Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- Kissing cousins : queerness, crime, and knowing -- Seeing sexuality like a state -- Forensic psychology, complicit expertise, and the legitimation of law -- Insurgent expertise and the hybrid network of LGBTQ asylum -- Asylum seekers and signs of queerness -- Sex offenders and the detection of deviance -- Queer subjects and the construction of risky countries -- Sexual predators and the constitution of dangerous individuals -- Conclusion : sexuality, science, and citizenship in the twenty-first century.

Abstract
Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification analyzes how legal and scientific institutions work together to reify and regulate sexual subjects in highly gendered and racialized ways. Using legal and discursive analysis, interviews with legal and scientific actors, and multi-sited ethnographic observations, it demonstrates that attempts to classify sexual “others” naturalize social differences along the lines of sexuality and simultaneously legitimate differential forms of social control and legal regulation. Through a comparative analysis of sexual orientation-based asylum claims and risk evaluations of sex offenders—two arenas where adjudicators must determine subjects’ sexualities—Sorting Sexualities shows how the state attempts to enroll non-state expert actors to help craft classificatory schemas that render sexual “others” legible to and thus manageable by the state. Drawing on different types of social science expertise results in divergent classification practices and, in turn, disparate definitions of sexual subjects. Through their contributions to the creation of “epistemic logics,” or hybridized ways of knowing that form in interstitial organizational spaces, experts may support state goals or, alternatively, push for social change. Sorting Sexualities ultimately reveals how different notions of identity, risk, and citizenship have come into being through contestations over legal and scientific knowledge-making, as well as how those knowledge-making practices become institutionalized and affect how we govern. Provided by publisher.