Sex Panic Rhetorics Queer Interventions

"This work makes the counter-intuitive argument that contemporary "sex panics" in a variety of political and social arenas are symptoms of queerphobia, even when the panic in question presents itself as being about something else (e.g., sex trafficking, incest, child abuse), and, moreover, that liberal values and ideologies collude in creating and perpetuating these queerphobic panics. In the case studies that populate the book's six body chapters (child molester panics, sex trafficking panics, incest panics, transgender panics, queer kids, pedagogy panics), Ian Barnard is concerned not so much with looking at the overt homophobia and transphobia that are the more obvious objects of anti-homophobic and anti-transphobic analysis as in excavating their significant traces in a neo-liberal culture that has supposedly demonstrated its civility by its embrace of diversity, renunciation of its homophobic past, and attentiveness to the transgender revolution that is sweeping popular, media, and political culture in the US and elsewhere"--