The Supreme Court, Visibility, and the Politics of Presence

Jane Schacter has made a critical contribution by elaborating the meaning and potential consequences of the Court\u27s holding in Romer v. Evans. At the center of her account is the thought-provoking suggestion that the Court\u27s opinion enables a visibility or presence for gays and lesbians in the extended realm of the political. While I salute her illumination, I am less certain about whether to share her optimism. In this Comment, I will explore the latter question by looking beyond the decision in Romer to other cases involving group-based civil rights. I will probe the effects of Supreme Court decisionmaking on the politics of presence, which I define as a society-wide conversation about the political consequences of conceiving people as members of groups rather than as unmarked individuals. I will argue, in particular, that the Court\u27s decision in Shaw v. Reno (and its progeny) has strong negative consequences for the visibility of minority political interests, and for the development of a politics of presence that comprehends issues of race. I will conclude by considering how this interpretation might be reconciled with the view Professor Schacter takes of Romer. Professor Schacter argues that legally and socially coerced... invisibility is a central feature of gay and lesbian existence, and an important cause of gay inequality. By striking down Amendment 2, a measure that exacerbated coerced invisibility, the Court in Romer enabled gays and lesbians to appear to a greater extent in the extended political domain. This appearance itself is salient, because of its potential to ameliorate political inequality and raise public consciousness; it is also the first step toward engendering a broader debate about the consequences of this group\u27s, and other groups\u27, presence in politics. I agree with Professor Schacter\u27s account of coerced invisibility as constituting a unique feature of gay and lesbian existence; but for the purposes of this Comment I am going to give a different reading to this group\u27s dilemma about visibility in politics, what Eve Sedgwick has called a universalizing rather than a minoritizing construction. In the ongoing conversations, negotiations, and entanglements that constitute the extended sphere of politics, most socially marginalized groups struggle with questions of visibility and presence: How visible is our group? What acts affect the extent to which we are seen, and the images according to which we are understood? What are the personal costs associated with efforts to attain greater visibility? In answering these questions, many groups confront a fact faced early and often by gays and lesbians: group members are not the only ones who control the way, or the extent to which, the group is seen in the extended world of the political. A range of social and institutional forces shape questions of group visibility and image; these forces affect the ability of group members both to make claims for themselves and to explore a politics that gives a more central place to group membership. Among these characterizing forces, and central to our discussion here, is the Supreme Court