ABSTRACT
The Afterword draws together the central arguments and contributions of this book. The stories told through the previous chapters show that policing is a durable institution that can adapt and expand, absorb queer critiques, and repackage and retell violent histories as stories of social advancement and institutional maturity. The legitimacy that police gain through this process complicates the task of challenging injustice, because the powerful proclaim to be on the side of the weak while maintaining or building a position of dominance. Thus, paradoxically, LGBT rights discourses may bolster the power of an institution that has long functioned to shore up the ‘proper’ boundaries of normative sexuality and gender. Evolving LGBT-police relations prompt renewed discussion about the role and effects of policing in society, for queers and others. Above all, Queer Histories and the Politics of Policing has sought to make sense of contemporary strategies of governing sexuality and gender—the histories from which they emerge and the futures they foreclose—and the threads of resistance running through them.
