National security discourse, excluding operation mechanisms, and resistance of homosexual federal employees during the Lavender Scare
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: During the Lavender Scare, the U.S. federal government constructed a complex discourse and institutional mechanism to exclude homosexuals from the civil service system. National security discourse constructed homosexuals as “security risks” through medical, security, and moral dimensions, providing legitimizing foundation for systematic exclusion. The Civil Service Commission implemented technically neutral procedural mechanisms—including fitness assessments, background investigations, and administrative discretion—to achieve sophisticated monitoring and exclusion of homosexual identities, transforming political judgments into administrative decisions. Facing this institutional discrimination, homosexual federal employees developed multi-layered responses: initially maintaining survival through identity concealment and mutual aid networks; later, activists like Kameny expanded institutional gaps through legal challenges; finally, organizations like the Mattachine Society used public protests and discourse reconstruction to challenge the pathologizing framework. This article argues that the Lavender Scare was not merely Cold War repression but a paradigmatic case of how modern power operates through neutralized procedures, depoliticized discourse, and subject-formation, producing both exclusion and conditions for resistance. This transformation from disciplined objects to political subjects reveals modern power’s productive characteristics and contradictions, providing historical perspective on how marginalized groups create change within power networks.
Source: Labor History
Author: Erlang Tang
Institution: Zhongnan University of Economics and Law
Language: English
Topic: Gender and Feminist Studies
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4411149449