Naturally, such an endeavour is also shaped by personal reflection, based on what I perceive as my own unusually fortunate experiences within these academic spaces in North America and Europe since the early 2000s. 2 The relevance of that crisis to our interconnected lives is plainly apparent now, but we largely left it to other fields to study, despite the fact that political institutions played a central role in actively ignoring and/or exacerbating that political tragedy for a decade ( Densham, 2006).ĭrawing on the premise set by Paisley Currah ( 2011) in the epigraph, I use this as an opportunity to survey a literature on LGBTIQ marginalisation in a field of inquiry that remains structured by hetero- and cis-normativity. However, here, a persistent theme emerges: given that the communities HIV/AIDS was perceived to affect were at the margins – their lives were ‘niche’, so to say – they thus also remained marginal to our attention in political science. The announcement of a ‘gay-related immune deficiency’ has its 40th anniversary this year. In the most ringing example of this moment, the field may well have been better prepared to address the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic had more political scientists paid attention to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Such exclusions lead to glaring oversights in our purview as scholars. In many ways, the observations in this domain dovetail with the encompassing work that has documented the active exclusion of gender in the study of politics ( Engeli and Mügge, 2020) – exclusions that are often applicable to research on LGBTIQ politics in the field. This article reflects on the limited space for LGBTIQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer) 1 research in political science, both in the field generally and in its journals. cholarship investigating how heterosexuality is reinforced, produced, and promoted through institutions (including disciplinary apparatuses of knowledge production) could, and should, be integral to political science. Perhaps the absence of research on LGBT topics, however, signals the largely unquestioned presence of heteronormativity – defined by Cathy Cohen (1997) as ‘localized practices and centralized institutions that legitimize and privilege heterosexuality … as fundamental and “natural” within society’….
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