Covering: The hidden assault on our civil rights by Kenji Yoshino
| Published date | 01 July 2008 |
| Date | 01 July 2008 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2008.00710_4.x |
Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The hidden assault on our civil rights,New York:
Random House, 2006, 304 pp, hb $24.95.
Yoshi no, a professor atYale Law School, has written a book which rejects ‘the tones
of legal impersonality’ (xii) by being deeply autobiographical but which also suc-
ceeds in pres enting a thought-provoking t heoryo fc ivil r ights.The approach makes
for a book which is both highly readable and a valuable addition to the lite rature for
those working in areas including gayr ights, equality,diversity and intersectionality.
Yoshino’s thesis is carefully constructed, with its foundations in an intensely
personal account in the introductory section (‘An uncovered self’) then built up,
layer by layer, in three main parts. In the introductory section, he presents an
account of, as he puts it,‘my attempts to elaborate my identity as a gay man, and,
to a lesser extent, my identity as an Asian-American’ (xii). He spends some time
recounting struggles with his identity in boarding school, as an undergraduate at
Harvard, a Rhodes scholarat the University of Oxfordand, ¢nally, as a student at
Yale Law School.This account is well-written for the most partthough, in a small
number of places when setting the scene for the reader, it leans towards melo-
drama(‘Oxfordwas gray.The stone gargoyles simpered withtheir cheeks on their
long ¢ngers’ (8)). By contrast, the writing is at its best when describing in simple
but powerful terms his own struggles with outsider status. As such, this part of
the book is a valuable ¢rst-hand account of what Cownie, in Legal Academics: Cul-
ture and Identities (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2004), called the ‘lived experience’, in
this case, of someone confronted bymonolithic, institutional norms. In this capa-
city, the workusefully complements empirical research on the experiences of out-
siders in other contexts, such as Sommerlad’s work on women solicitors in the
UK or Hunter’s on women barristers in Australia.
Having set out his struggle to arrive at a gay identity,Yoshino combines hind-
sight and his reading of sociologistErving Go¡man’s Stigma: Notes on the Manage-
ment of a Spoiled Id entity (Englewood Cli¡s, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963) to
compartmentalise his story into‘three phases, which I could also trace in the lives
of gaypeers’ (17). The¢rst phase is dominated bya desire for conversion, and in his
own life waspunctuated by fervent prayers inthe college chapel‘not to be what I
was’ (17).The second phase involves ‘passing’, meaning the personalacceptance of
one’s homosexuality while hiding it from others.The third phase, which becomes
the most important for the book, is characterized by ‘covering’ which, for
Yoshino, meant playing down his sexual orientation despite having come out to
his law school colleagues (for instance by not writing on gay topics or engaging
in public displays of same-sex a¡ection (18)). More generally,Yoshino argues that
covering involves a person suppressing aspects of their identity because of con-
cerns about their ‘obtrusiveness’ (18) and stigma.
The analytical framework comprising the phases of conversion, passing and
covering is set out on relatively few pages (17^9) but is critically important to
Yoshino’s larger thesis. Beyond using it to describe his own ‘set of performances’
(18),Yoshino makes three claims for this framework, on which basis it acts as the
bridge between the personal and more analytical parts of the book. First, he
claims that the three phases represent ‘a set of demands that society had made
of me to minimize my gayness’ and that of many other gay individuals (18^9)
Reviews
656 r2008 The Author.Journal Compilation r20 08 The ModernLaw Review Limited.
(2008) 71(4) 641^661
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