Kenneth Plummer

Kenneth Plummer (4 April 1946 – 4 November 2022) was a British sociologist. He was a professor of sociology at the University of Essex for 30 years. Plummer was the founder of the Sexualities journal, which he ran until 2012, and a theoretician of critical humanism. He was one of the pioneers of sociology-oriented LGBT studies and one of the first researchers to study homosexuality as a stigmatized sexuality, instead of an illness.

Plummer founded the Sexualities journal in 1998. Following his retirement due to health issues, he started intensively publishing books on the field of sociology. He also developed his theory of critical humanism during that period. Plummer has published on the topic of symbolic interactionism, and on how narratives and storytelling can influence systems of power in society. Plummer published Imaginations, a book about the history of sociology research at the University of Essex, in 2014.

A recipient of an organ donation himself, Plummer started advocating in favor of organ donation campaigns after going a series of surgeries. He documented his health issues in his essay titled "My Multiple Sick Bodies".

Books Sexual Stigma (1975) The Making of the Modern Homosexual (1981) Documents of Life (1983) Telling Sexual Stories (1995) Documents of Life 2: An Invitation to a Critical Humanism (2000) Intimate Citizenship (2003) Sociology: The Basics (2010) Imaginations (2014) Narrative Power: The Struggle for Human Value (2019)