"Publics and Counterpublics" is a collection of essays based around the central question "what is a public?" Around half of the essays in the book have been published previously. Chapter one, "Public and Private", reviews the definitions of these terms, and traces the history of debates around public and private spheres, particularly around the women's liberation, and then the gay rights, movements. Chapter two, "Publics and Counterpublics", looks at redefining and expanding upon the term "public", to introduce multiple publics. The chapter then introduces the concept of counterpublics, initially termed by Nancy Fraser to mean a public that is subordinate to a dominant public. Chapter three, "Styles of Intellectual Publics", considers the style of discourse in academic work and the impact this has on the type of public it creates. It suggests that Michel Foucault might have described intellectual work as a counterpublic, and discusses this possibility. Chapter four, "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject", responds to Jürgen Habermas' "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere" introducing some of the concepts we now regard as queer theory. As the essay was originally published in 1989, it was written before the term "queer theory" had become widely used. Chapter five, "Sex in Public", was co-written with Lauren Berlant, and published previously in 1998. "Sex in Public" serves as a case study in the struggles over the mediation of publics, and is very similar, thematically, to "The Trouble With Normal". Chapter six, "Something Queer About the Nation State", discusses queer politics and activism, and its relationship to the state. Chapter seven, "A Soliloquy 'Lately Spoken at the African Theatre': Race and the Public Sphere in New York City, 1821", considers an historical counterpublic and its context, and the texts that upheld it. Chapter eight, "Whitman Drunk" critiques Walt Whitman's work "Franklin Evans" and its reception in the context of temperance activism.