Queering Counterpublics and Intimate Citizenship

Ken Plummer, a pioneer of LGBTIA+ studies in the United Kingdom and Europe, died on 4 November 2022. His work has been influential and inspiring and making possible a critical engagement with non-heterosexual ways of life in a climate shaped by social and institutional homophobia, lesbophobia, and biphobia. This chapter evaluates the legacy of Ken’s work for critical scholarship in gender and sexuality studies, and specifically for queer studies . Ken’s relationship to queer studies was highly ambivalent, evidenced in his consistent criticism of queer theory, originating from his firm commitment to symbolic interactionism and his primary interest in material, fleshy embodiment, rather than the theoretical abstraction he associated with queer theory. The chapter argues that this ambivalence notwithstanding, Ken’s work carries much potential for a critically engaged queer scholarship. Through a queer reading of Ken’s concepts of counterpublics and intimate citizenship , I show that his radical emphasis on the body sparks a truly ‘queer’ potential for considering sexualities in the public sphere. Comparing Michael Warner’s and Ken Plummer’s theorisation of counterpublicity, I argue that despite his distrust in queer poststructuralist abstraction and because of his assertive endorsement of fleshy embodiment at the heart of social theorising, his work paradoxically invites a stimulus for queering citizenship and public sphere theories (including his own). Rather than simply claiming Ken as a ‘queer theorist’, the chapter engages in theoretical boundary work (following a method proposed by Clare Hemmings) in exploring the epistemological effects of reading Ken through a queer lens, demonstrating the queer legacy of his way of theorising.