Blasé Deviant Lawyers, Denial of Discrimination, and the Case for Queer-CRT

Using 60 ethnographic interviews with a range of minority law students and early career legal professionals, this Article illuminates the cruciality of eCRT tools to understand the experience of individual deviance and the usefulness of a queer theory lens in aiding such an effort. Analysis from these narrative data show that students with different kinds of peripheral identities experience professional spaces in many uniquely different ways but that narratives across minority categories (primarily differentiated by race, gender identity, religion, and disability) also overlapped in important ways. Particularly, the data show a clear pattern among these differently peripheral actors of what I call “blasé discrimination”. Unlike microaggressions which might have resonance in common cultural parlance as an operationalization of structural violence, what distinguishes blasé discrimination, I argue, is the ordinariness of the act in common interactional parlance alongside its relative unlikeliness to be seen as problematic when confronted. It is this possibility of defense and even justification in the face of being questioned about the violence that makes blasé discrimination and its ambiguous parameters worthy of our attention in identity jurisprudence. This exploration of the blasé response to discrimination sheds light – borrowing from queer theory - on the opportunities available for theory building when difference is analyzed across narrative to focus on the commonalities of deviance across sub-categories of assumed identity. In turn, it offers a framework for considering what I am framing as the “QuEer-CRT” approach for sociolegal scholarship.