Lauren Jae Gutterman

“Queer Survival” traces the cultural, political, and intellectual connections between gender and sexual nonconformity and surviving childhood sexual abuse in the United States from the late-nineteenth century to the present. Historians’ abiding concern with the stereotyping of LGBTQ people as child sexual predators has eclipsed a similarly enduring discourse linking queerness and survival. While depictions of LGBTQ adults as sexual predators have worked exclusively to stigmatize queer people, this project shows how understandings of LGBTQ people as survivors have served a wider range of political purposes. At different historical moments, different groups of people have used this perceived connection to empower and to silence survivors of childhood sexual abuse; to validate and to undermine LGBTQ identity; to overturn and to uphold conventional gender roles and family structures. Despite popular attempts to portray the two as antithetical, “Queer Survival” argues that struggles against childhood sexual abuse and LGBTQ movements have been deeply intertwined.