Queer as U.S. Constitutional History

This symposium marks the tenth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. To help scholars understand the significance of the decision, we invited essays on the queer constitutional history that led to Obergefell and on the queer constitutional histories that Obergefell ignored, elided, and obscured. We defined “queer U.S. constitutional history” broadly, to invite, in addition to essays about the history of same-sex marriage and the Supreme Court’s treatment of gay and lesbian plaintiffs, pieces about the constitutional fates of trans people, of sex and gender outside the context of marriage, and of all constitutional claims-making concerning nonnormative or stigmatized gender and sexual phenomena. This introductory essay to the symposium analyzes the substantive terrain and methodological approaches of our growing subfield. It reflects on the articles gathered here, as well as the state of the field, by putting forward four “axioms” that, we are aware, may not be axiomatic for other constitutional historians. These concern the fictive and yet useful term “queer” as a unifying one for the object of study; the wide range of historical questions and data that may be gathered under the umbrella of queer constitutional history; failure as a subject of re-search and part of the history of constitutional meaning; and the queer constitutional history of emotions.