Interrogating the Use of LGBTQ Slurs: Still Smearing the Queer?

Interrogating the Use of LGBTQ Slurs: Still Smearing the Queer? provides a critical exploration of LGBTQ slurs through its innovative focus on hetero-cis-normativity and Norm-Centered Stigma Theory (NCST), the first-ever testable theory about stigma. Based on research with more than 3,000 respondents, the ways gender/sexuality norm-violators are stigmatized and disciplined as “others” through asserting and affirming one’s own social power are highlighted alongside other unique elements of slur use (joking and bonding).

Through its fresh and in-depth approach, this book is the ideal resource for those who want to learn about LGBTQ slurs more generally and for those who seek a nuanced, theory-driven, and intersectional examination of how these LGBTQ prejudices function. In doing so, it is the most comprehensive scholarly resource to date that critically examines the use of LGBTQ slurs and thus, has the potential to have broad impacts on society at large by helping to improve the LGBTQ cultural climate.

Interrogating the use of LGBTQ Slurs: Still Smearing the Queer? is important reading for scholars and students in the fields of LGBTQ studies, Gender Studies, Criminology, and Sociology.

Meredith G. F. Worthen, Ph.D. (the University of Texas at Austin, 2009), is a Professor of Sociology, elected faculty member of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, and faculty affiliate of the Center for Social Justice at the University of Oklahoma. Her main interests are in the sociological constructions of deviance and stigma, gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ identities, as well as feminist and queer criminology. She is the author of Queers, Bis, and Straight Lies: An Intersectional Investigation of LGBTQ Stigma (Routledge, 2020) and more than fifty academic pieces.