Libby Adler's "Governing the Terrain Called Beauty"

Libby Adler is a Professor of Law and Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. She is the author of Gay Priori: A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform (2018) as well as numerous articles on LGBTQ legal issues. She was appointed a commissioner on the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth in 2026.

Adler applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Governing the Terrain Called Beauty: The Queerness of Political Economy in Cuba and the United States, and reported the following:

Page 99 is in the middle of chapter 4 at a break between sections. The section that is concluding argues that the advent of same-sex marriage in Cuba required a reconfiguration of gay identity. The section that is starting offers a partial theory of how that reconfiguration occurred.

The glimpse via page 99 fairly represents an important piece of the book but does not explain the overall argument.

Part I of the book explains the history of gay identity and regulation in Cuba and the US. In Cuba, the role of imperialism and the fall of Cuba’s prime benefactor, the Soviet Union, are crucial to understanding the evolution of sexual identity in political-economic terms. Part II of the book, in which page 99 appears, is about the advent of same-sex marriage and how that legal reform grows out of distinct historical and economic forces in the two countries (Cuba and the US). Part III introduces Cuban legal voices in the form of interviews and uses these voices to theorize the significance of legal consciousness to divergent forms of legal change.

Learn more about Governing the Terrain Called Beauty at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue