Professor Libby Adler’s New Book Asks What Cuba Can Teach Liberal Democracies About LGBTQ Rights

07.14.26 — In her new book, Governing the Terrain Called Beauty: The Queerness of Political Economy in Cuba and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2026), Adler examines a national jurisdiction that owes little to liberal rights discourse — revolutionary Cuba — to ask whether a socialist legal system has anything to teach rights-based democracies like the United States about advancing LGBTQ equality without leaving the poorest members of that community behind.

“This project began with a deceptively simple question: How might a socialist jurisdiction ‘do’ LGBTQ legal advancement differently from a jurisdiction like the US, where advocates have relied heavily on liberal rights to secure formal equality but have done far less to address economic stratification within the LGBTQ population,” said Adler, who has written extensively on sexuality, gender, family and children, drawing heavily on queer and critical legal theory.

Readers of Adler’s first book, Gay Priori: A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform (Duke University Press, 2018), will recognize the question as a continuation of that earlier project. Gay Priori illuminated the costs associated with the discourse of equal rights that has advanced the interests of lgbtq people in the US, including intransigent economic marginalization of lgbtq subpopulations typically distinguished by race, region of the US, and/or age.

Cuba is currently enduring severe economic hardship and suffering from a complete lack of oil as a result of an embargo imposed by the Trump administration. It is not the first time Cubans have faced serious material deprivation, and Adler’s research shows that the island’s recurring economic struggles and adaptations have long been entangled — in complicated and often surprising ways — with how sexual and gender identity have been governed there.

To draw out those entanglements, Governing the Terrain Called Beauty traces the history of LGBTQ identity and law in Cuba and the United States from the turn of the 20th century through the legalization of same-sex marriage, examining the material and discursive conditions before, during, and after the Cold War, along with the underappreciated role of legal consciousness in shaping reform. Adler draws on comparative legal analysis, genealogy, critical social theory, and original interviews to stage what she describes as a deep encounter between Cuba and the US — one that attends to the millions of small, constitutive collisions that occur daily between the global and the local, and that reveals how law and identity evolve under imperialism, anxious nationalisms, racial stratification, and economic hardship.

In the end, what Adler discovers is a methodological lesson: “When trying to understand any particular space of governance, attributing too much determinative power to ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’ writ large can obscure the intricacies and heterogeneity that come into view through a more genealogical lens.”

In addition to Governing the Terrain Called Beauty and Gay Priori, Adler is co-editor of the casebook Mary Joe Frug’s Women and the Law and has published widely on LGBTQ issues and family law. In 2024, she received the Association of American Law Schools LGBTQ+ Inclusive Excellence Award for her decades of scholarship and institution-building at Northeastern. She was also an inaugural recipient of Northeastern Law’s Racial Justice Faculty Fellowship in 2021 which funded her research trip to Cuba.

Governing the Terrain Called Beauty is available now in digital, hardback, and paperback editions from Cambridge University Press.

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