Beyond the enforcement principle: Sodomy laws, social norms, and social panoptics

Social norms scholarship offers various conceptual models for understanding law's capacity to produce or inhibit particular behaviors. The current lit erature, however, has inadequately attended to either testing these theorie s through empirical research or studying law's ancillary effects on social structure and individuals' lives. in response, this Article undertakes an e mpirical study of the social effects of an unenforced criminal law: sodomy statutes. The Article examines the constitutive impact these laws have on i ndividual identify, social relations, and conceptions of public space. This aspect of the study is based on ethnographic research conducted in South A frica before and after the country's sodomy laws were abolished The finding s of this inquiry provide the empirical basis for development of a conceptu al model for understanding the process by which laws intersect with informa l social surveillance to produce a regime in which lesbians and gays are ul timately encouraged to discipline themselves. In developing this framework, the Article calls for integrating these understandings of micro-level soci al relations into a macro-sociological perspective on the regulatory effect s of law. The Article thus examines the influence exerted by the criminaliz ation of homosexuality on other institutional discourses (such as religion and medicine). These connections are explored as one way of analyzing law's constitutive effects in shaping and remaking social norms.