Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Agency and Power (review)

“fi nding themselves” to portrayals of gay life post-coming out and sans anguish. Further, the multiple meanings of gay marriage represent a story of “simultaneous victory and retrenchment” (212) and her analysis in this section could not be timelier. Although Walters is rarely prescriptive in this text, her conclusion does call for a third way beyond the closet and the spectacle, a “conscious, conscientious integration” (24) where that integration fundamentally alters culture. Given her consistent refusal of the polarities of progress and backlash, Walters’s conclusion resists a tidy ending but does suggest reasons for optimism, gesturing toward “possibilities unimaginable in previous eras” (299). Those possibilities include powerful implications for heterosexuality (“seeing [hetero]sexuality in less fi nite and tandem ways” [299]), for notions of the family, and for intimacy more broadly construed. Although Walters’s argument is a simple one and the examples begin to feel somewhat repetitive, this accessible, engaging text makes an important contribution to popular cultural studies and to a number of contemporary debates in the GLBT community.