by Zoe M. Savitsky
Abstract
Scholars have written for decades about the circumscribed lives of “perfect plaintiffs,” people chosen for cause litigation due to their mainstream appeal, or whose real stories have been rewritten through litigation to better fit a conventional, assimilationist mold. In the specific context of queer rights litigation, scholars have studied this phenomenon, describing lesbian, gay, and other queer plaintiffs seemingly chosen for their heteronormativity or whose stories have been reshaped to fit heteronormative expectations. Scholarly concern about the impact of excluding those who do not fit a “perfect plaintiff” model from the law’s protections are both real and warranted. But it is also important to question whether only “perfect plaintiffs” have truly been chosen for cause litigation, and whether only “perfect plaintiffs” have won. This study tried to answer those questions by looking at the federal marriage-equality-related cases involving women, which predated or became Obergefell v. Hodges. The study examined whether the female litigants in those cases were “perfect plaintiffs,” and whether or not their conformity to “perfection” impacted whether they won or lost. Broadly, across years and geographies, the study found that many dozens of women who did not fit the “perfect plaintiff” archetype won their cases, and did so without all hiding the diverse, messy, hard, joyful realities of their lives or conforming to expectations of majoritarian “perfection.” The study also critically redescribed qualities that may be mainstream, heteronormative, “perfect,” in male plaintiffs, such as military service, through the intersectional lenses of gender, race, and sexuality. These qualities emerged as less normative, less prototypically “perfect,” when the person serving was a woman, particularly a racialized lesbian woman. Overall, the study suggested that, in some contexts, critical aspects of the “perfect plaintiff” story are myth, not fact, and pointed to the possibility of a wider space for honesty about, at least, lesbian lives, in the context of cause litigation.