How Quantification Shapes Relations of Visibility: The Case of 10% and the Construction of Gay Identities in the U.S., 1948-1994
This article investigates how quantification constructs relations of visibility through the lens of an extended case study. By visibility we mean how numbers mediate what is noticed or not. We analyze the surprising role that mid-20th century measures of sexuality played in the modern U.S. gay right...
Enregistré dans:
| Dans: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/statsoc, |
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| Auteurs principaux: | , |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Anglais |
| Publié: |
Statistique et société
2025
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| Sujets: | |
| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | This article investigates how quantification constructs relations of visibility through the lens of an extended case study. By visibility we mean how numbers mediate what is noticed or not. We analyze the surprising role that mid-20th century measures of sexuality played in the modern U.S. gay rights movement, roughly from 1948-1994. An unintended consequence of Alfred Kinsey’s measures of sexual behavior was that a particular statistic—that 10% of the population is homosexual—influenced how participants in an emerging civil rights movement understood themselves and how they organized. Measures of sexual practice and people's critique and interpretation of these measures helped to forge a durable collective and political identity, as well as helping to determine the political strategies they and their opponents adopted. Here, measures helped to produce a visibility that allowed people to understand themselves as a group, as a political constituency, for a previously largely invisible body of people, and this visibility made possible a vibrant identity politics, which in turn, helped to determine how people organized and understood themselves as members. |
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