Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion

(Hardback)

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Rainbow Trap is the first book to foreground the importance of systems and their associated documents, policies and administrative practices as a key battleground for LGBTQ equalities in the UK. Looking across digital and non-digital systems, Guyan investigates six systems hate crime reporting and the police, dating apps, borders, film and television, the body, and the business world and exposes a hidden rule book that constructs, categorises and commodifies LGBTQ identities. While many organisations, businesses and workplaces talk a lot about diversity and inclusion, the internal workings of most systems remain unchanged. Efforts to fix broken systems tend to follow a narrow set of options: elevate queer individuals to senior roles, add more diverse people into organisations, acknowledge historical injustices, gather better evidence and address biases. But these solutions arent working. Whether it is queer families fighting for each parent to be named on their childs birth certificate, lesbian couples offered an inferior selection of mortgage rates, bisexual asylum seekers asked to provide proof of their sexuality, or gay actors forced to out themselves to meet diversity quotas, LGBTQ people encounter systems that are designed around a default person who is cisgender and straight. Everyone loses when systems repeatedly fail to reflect the world around us and make bad decisions based on biased assumptions. How we choose to engage with these systems or if we choose to engage is fundamental to everyones future.

Author Bio

Kevin Guyan is a Research Fellow in the School of Culture & Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow, UK. In 2022, he published his first book Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action (Bloomsbury Academic).