Rainbow Trap

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion, written and read by Kevin Guyan

Rainbow Trap reveals how the fight for LGBTQ equalities in the UK is shaped – and constrained – by the classifications we encounter every day.

Looking across six systems – the police and the recording of hate crimes; dating apps and digital desire; outness in the film and television industry; borders and LGBTQ asylum seekers; health and fitness activities; and DEI initiatives in the workplace – Rainbow Trap documents how inclusive interventions – such as new legislation, revamped diversity policies and tech fixes – have attempted to bring historically marginalized communities out of the shadows.

Yet, as part of the bargain, LGBTQ people need to locate themselves in an ever-growing list of classifications, categories and labels to ‘make sense’ to the very systems they are seeking to access. This requirement to be classified catches LGBTQ communities in a rainbow trap. Because when we look beyond the welcoming veneer of inclusive interventions, we uncover sorting processes that determine what LGBTQ lives are valued and what queer futures are possible.

Critics Review

A nuanced and detailed examination of the efficacy of equality metrics on job application forms and other mechanisms of officialdom … Fascinating.
Morning Star
In a world that wants to see everything in black and white, once again, Guyan showcases its true complexity with masterful clarity. Rainbow Trap is one of those books that will stay with you and make you reconsider how (and why) we employ inclusivity today.
Dr Alfredo Carpineti, Chair of Pride in STEM
Rainbow Trap is a fascinating and thoughtful analysis of the ways that categorisations can sometimes result in unintended outcomes, and a must-read for queer scholars!
Paul Baker, Lancaster University, UK
Written with his characteristic thoroughness and thoughtfulness, Kevin Guyan's Rainbow Trap beautifully explores classification's role in shaping queer lives, and the possibilities and perils of treating it as a tool of liberation. At a time when questions about the politics and experience of queer lives are more urgent than ever, Guyan's work represents a vital contribution to both academic, and activist, conversations about how to pursue freedom.
Dr. Os Keyes, University of Massachusetts, USA
In this exciting new book, Guyan takes us through the possibilities and problems of classifying people, sexualities and genders. Exploring how labels that are counted both offer access to some equalities and also limit liberations, this book refuses the tedium of administrative process, showing their power and elasticity. Recommended for academics, activists, policy makers and those who make those policies a reality, this book is a must read for those interested in equalities, differences and the systems that both create, and refuse to see, us.
Kath Browne, University College Dublin, Ireland
An admirably clear, incisive articulation of something that's often impossible to articulate, or even grasp: the political and social work done by queer classification practices. It's a must-read for anyone working in queer sociology, homonationalism, or workplace diversity.
Kit Heyam, author of 'Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender'
A fascinating tour of the limitations and material consequences that stem from ‘the rainbow trap’! Guyan exposes our reliance on classification systems that will never capture all of us. Each chapter carefully explores the stakes for ‘box breakers’ – those queer and trans folks who encounter great difficulty navigating our social systems and institutional structures because they do not fit. Attempts to reform in the service of inclusion merely produce new sets of challenges and exclusions. Instead, Guyan offers us five principles to keep in mind as we continue to design and navigate today’s classification architecture.
Rena Bivens, Carleton University, Canada
Kevin Guyan does it again! Rainbow Trap is an utterly fascinating, incredibly readable, journey through how equality initiatives aim to help LGBTQ+ people and the associated social science. Across the journey, he tackles some incredibly controversial topics with profound insight and nuance – everything from the relative over-representation and advantage some LGBTQ+ people have in some parts of our society, to trans inclusion in sport and the rise of global transphobia.
Peter Matthews, Professor in Social Policy and LGBTQ+ Studies, University of Stirling
Kevin Guyan’s Rainbow Trap is a bracing, lucid study that brings nuance where too often there is none. Through interviews, personal recollections and a trenchant analysis of classification systems, Guyan interrogates the efficacy of identification, and finds meaning in the gaps and interstices, pointing to queer futures located outside the box.
Jack Parlett, author of The Poetics of Cruising and Fire Island
Rainbow Trap is a must read for anyone interested in LGBTQIA+ liberation, as well as for people working in fields where demographic classifications are important. Guyan’s book powerfully demonstrates that when it comes to the LGBTQIA+ community, systems of classification and data collection obscure as much as they reveal, and across domains from addressing hate crime to finding a date, designing boxes to slot our diverse community into often causes real world harm.
Nancy Kelley, Executive Director DIVA
Engrossing, exposing and so very well reasoned. Guyan gives us a chilling insight into our broken systems and how queer people fall through the cracks – to our own peril. Guyan provokes us to consider how laws, admin and classification systems are not designed to recognise the diversity of queer life and ignites a vision for a queer future without such restrictive boxes. Rainbow Trap fundamentally shifts one’s view of classification systems and our place within them. If there is one book I would urge everyone to read – our corporate, EDI and cultural leaders most especially - it is Rainbow Trap. Tremendous, troubling, exposing and triumphant.
Harry Nicholas, author of ‘A Trans Man Walks Into a Gay Bar’
Rainbow Trap is a call to rethink the way we view inclusion – at work, in dating apps or when drafting laws – and whether we are doing it at someone else’s expense, or even at our own.
Enrique Anarte, LGBTQ+ journalist and creator
In this accessible and engaging book, Kevin Guyan foregrounds the voices of queer people who can’t or won’t conform with State classification practices, systems and administrative tools. Problematising contemporary policy initiatives in which datafication and classification are assumed to be necessary precursers of ‘inclusion and access’, Guyan skilfully demonstrates the ways that even well-meaning policies and practices can harm those who do not conform to sex and gender binaries.
Kath Albury, Professor, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
The 21st century has seen significant progress in the inclusion and representation of LGBTQ individuals in public domains, particularly in the Global North. Rainbow Trap takes a critical step back, offering a compelling queer critique of inclusion and diversity politics as well as the classification systems shaping queer lives. This passionate and courageous examination of contemporary queer politics is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of queer classifications, categories, and labels.
Travis S.K. Kong, Author of Sexuality and the Rise of China: The Post-1990 Gay Generation in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China (2023)
Across six different socio-cultural categories Rainbow Trap undoes and remakes the future of LGBTQ inclusion. In these pages we are provided a searing critique of queer DEI initiatives that complicate how the administrative categorizations of the state and capitalism seek to stabilize, make knowable and to concretize queer lives. What emerges is that non-heterosexuality and the refusal of binary gender positions cannot be contained, managed and made certain by the administrative apparatus that requires those categories to always remain the same. Instead, inclusion actually demands an entirely new set of arrangements for how we conceive of human life when that life meets queer, or LGBTQ lives and living. The politics of inclusion in this powerful account is far more radical than simply joining and or making room for others in what already exist.
Rinaldo Walcott, Author of The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (2021)
A brilliant examination of how classification systems – the boxes, labels, and categories meant to include LGBTQ people – often end up trapping us. From dating apps to hate crime laws, Guyan masterfully reveals how bureaucratic inclusion can perpetuate harm. A landmark book that will transform how we think about identity, power, and what true liberation requires.
Paisley Currah, author of Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity (2022)
No reader of Rainbow Trap will ever take for granted ticking a box or choosing an identity category on a form again. Combining deep analysis of classification systems and rich interviews with technologists and activists, Kevin Guyan gives a nuanced account of how data-driven systems circumscribe the lives, desires, and identities of queer people. Guyan shows us how to think through the double-bind of being classified by newly ‘inclusive’ systems and institutions: it is at once a powerful form of recognition, and a limited frame that narrows queerness so that it can be pinned down to the stable categories that apps, corporations, and states rely upon to produce knowledge. Queer and trans ‘box breakers’ are at the center of Guyan's story, challenging existing classification regimes through their very ways of being. Rainbow Trap models how we might reimagine the foundations of systems, sense-making, and intelligibility outside of the drive to know and contain the world through categories.
Cait McKinney, author of Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (2020)
This book is an urgent and necessary interrogation of the promise and pitfalls of LGBTQ inclusion. Expertly marshalling key aspects of queer theory in an accessible way, Guyan weaves together both the personal and the political to critically unpick how growing efforts towards equality, diversity and inclusion might work for some members of the LGBTQ community yet risk leaving others invisible or harmed as they fail to represent, capture and contain the fluid nature of queer lives. Whether you’re a student studying gender and sexuality, or simply wish to make sense of what it means to be queer in the twenty-first century in the face of administrative and technological systems that attempt to classify and count us, this book is a must read.
Simon Lock, University College London, UK
In this crisply written book, Kevin Guyan demonstrates just how ubiquitous and pernicious classification as a technology of inclusion is in queer and trans life today. Ranging across realms as diverse as policing, dating, media, citizenship, wellness, and work, he illuminates how inclusion is a Faustian bargain, premised as it is on legibility within extant classificatory schemes. Calling for a centring of the ‘box breakers’ of the world, the carefully constructed argument culminates in a rousing call to debilitate the classification machine.
Rahul Rao, University of St Andrews, UK
Guyan’s book is an urgent and nuanced look at how data systems both construct and betray marginalized communities. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how bureaucracies and computing systems shape LGBTQI+ people as a group, even as those systems strive to describe them for the purposes of more equitable inclusion.
Mar Hicks, University of Virginia, USA
A fast-paced accessible and exciting read, relevant to many readers inside and outside of academia, as interdisciplinary scholars and activists, interrogating possibilities in queer existence as we mis-match 'inclusion'.
Yvette Taylor, University of Strathclyde, UK
Rainbow Trap is an urgent intervention, beautifully told through fascinating storytelling and compelling evidence. Guyan’s writing is dynamic and polemic, which makes for a stunning read that brings life to a crucial topic more people need to pay attention to.
Gemma Milne, author of Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It (2020)

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