Stefan Vogler. Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 280 p. Paperback, $30 (ISBN: 9780226776767)

Abstract

What is classification? What is its purpose and its impact in different institutional contexts? What can those impacts add up to in our material realities? Sorting Sexualities encourages us to ask these questions when we think about and describe sexuality. This slim but dense volume delves deeply into the ways that sexuality is seen and understood in different legal settings. In doing so, it leads the reader to confront the contradiction between our common social understanding of sexuality as a purely personal aspect of one’s identity, and the fact that the state has claimed a significant level of power in legal settings to define what is “normal” and what is “deviant” in sexuality. State interests can have enormous impacts on the lives of those whose sexuality is scrutinized and controlled by those definitions.