ABSTRACT
Queer politics has been innovative because of the degree to which it cultivates self-consciousness about public-sphere-mediated society and because of the degree to which that self-consciousness has been incorporated into the self-understanding of a metropolitan sexual subculture. The social realm is a cultural form, interwoven with the political form of the administrative state and with the normalizing assumptions of modern social knowledges such as economics. The nation-state is the political form of the social in that the social is what it both represents and administers, though in our own time the relation between the state form and the cultural form of the social has become noticeably strained. National governments, dominated in Anglo-American societies by conservative reaction, were more than usually opaque to rational-critical institutions. Queer politics has essentially abandoned the traditional conception of civil disobedience, which values the expression of individual integrity as a moral act regardless of its effect.
