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Queer Activism After Marriage Equality
Queer Activism After Marriage Equality focuses on the implications of legal same-sex marriage for LGBTQ social movements and organizing. It asks how the agendas, strategies, structures and financing of LGBTQ movement organizations are changing now that same-sex marriage is legal in some countries. Building on a major conference held in 2016 entitled "After The Future of LGBTQ Politics and Scholarship," this collection draws from critical and intersectional perspectives to explore the questions and issues facing the next chapter of LGBTQ activism and social movement work. It comprises academic papers, international case studies, edited transcripts of selected conference sessions, and interviews with activists. These take a critical look at the high-profile work of national and state-wide equality organizations, analyzing the costs of winning marriage equality and what that has meant for other LGBTQ activism. In addition to this, the book examines other forms of queer activism that have existed for years in the shadows of the marriage equality movement, as well as new social movements that have developed more recently. Finally, it looks to examples of activism in other countries and considers lessons U.S. activists can learn from them. By presenting research on these and other trends, this volume helps translate queer critiques advanced during the marriage campaigns into a framework for ongoing critical research in the after-marriage period.
- GenresQueer
220 pages, Paperback
Published May 15, 2018
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September 9, 2019
“… one individual family, one individual couple, really can’t transform the conditions of our community that are at the core of our survival. It can’t just be about individual couples.”
This book provided three things for me: (1) a differentiation between the mainstream gay rights movement, defined by single-issue advocacy, homonormativity and reformism, and the radical queer liberation movement, defined by intersectional analysis, margin-to-centre organising and transformative vision; and (2) insight into the intersections between queerness and other social hierarchies and states; and (3) insight into specific organisations, mainly in the U.S. but also in Iran, Turkey, Spain and France.
I enjoyed the various essays, though may have preferred a text that took the next step and processed the different texts into one cohesive text. In saying that, it was probably useful having different voices outlining different contexts.
Marriage
My biggest takeaway was how ridiculous it is that marriage is connected to rights and entitlements in law, privileging certain kinds of relationships over others. It encourages “the maintenance of the nuclear family as a primary organizing and privileging mechanism in U.S. society” and “the concept that material benefits should be awarded and distributed to individuals via state recognition of relationships.” The fight for inclusion of same-sex couples in the institution of marriage ignores the much larger issue: that the institution of marriage is entrenched by the state at all. This entrenchment encourages uncritical adoption of monogamy, rather than intentional shaping of family and romantic relationships as you want them to be. “… [the marriage equality agenda] has always privileged one form of sexual or romantic relationship - coupled, monogamous, private, unpaid - and participated in a sexual culture that demonises and polices other forms of sexuality: hook-ups, multiple partners, non-monogamy, sex work, public sex.” The inclusion of same-sex people in marriage is just the reinforcement and perpetuation of the same old liberal structures. “The narratives that centre marriage - they reduce justice to access, liberation to liberalism, same sex to same old sex. Equality in this narrative is little more a straight people’s club to which queers most willing to conform have gained admission.” This works at cross-purposes with “two of the primary goals of the lesbian and gay movement: the affirmation of gay identity and culture and the validation of many forms of relationships.” Why fight for inclusion rather than deconstruction? Why should greater validity be given to a certain family formation by the state? How does this impact single parents, those who view family as encompassing extended family, those in polyamorous romantic arrangements? How does this perpetuate the organisation of society according to nuclear family rather than wider community?
Marriage also has wider impacts on the political economy: “…marriage and the nuclear family privatize social reproduction and unpaid caregiving work. The financial burden of rearing new generations and caring for the old and the sick, all necessary social functions, is entirely placed on couples and families. While these conditions create huge savings for the wealthy, who don’t have to contribute towards the costs of maintaining a healthy supply of workers or pay for the care of those no longer able to work, they place enormous strains on individuals.”
“It is important to remember that, despite the romantic aura that surrounds it, the institution of marriage remains grounded in a set of private property relations that originated with feudalism, inheritance rights, and the need to control women’s productive and reproductive labour. After the end of feudalism, these property and labour relations were adapted to the capitalist system, a system that relies on state violence domestically (police) and globally (military) to maintain extreme inequality.”
GRM v QLM
It was also devastating to discover that mainstream gay rights organisations and activists in the U.S. had denigrated other forms of family recognition (i.e. domestic partnerships) in the fight for inclusion into marriage, resulting in an erosion of the validity of these alternative forms of recognition. This lead to many local municipalities and businesses revoking these forms of recognition after same-sex marriage was legalised. The fight for marriage “helped build increasingly narrow cultural and legal parameters of family and intimacy.” It was doubly devastating to find that they did not do this through the real stories of queer people - they had to create a narrative of “the ideal gay and lesbian life narrative based on focus-group research that revealed what straight people wanted to hear - a story that would validate and re-affirm the moral rightness of straight people’s own identities and life choices” and then “teach that story to real live queers, so that they could repeat this story back to straight people” including 45 minute training sessions on how to adopt this narrative. This taught them to “refract the complexities of queer lives through the filter of the most stereotypical heteronormative fantasy of marriage.” When you get down to it, “… marriage was positioned for voters as a way to domesticate and control the danger posed by gay sex.”
Overall, this was a burning criticism of gay rights organisations role in perpetuating neo-liberal frameworks through fighting for gay peoples inclusion into them. “In prioritising state-sanctioned recognition of erstwhile queer relationships, institutionalised and de-politicised LGBTQ social movements have effectively functioned to produce, and to police, the proper (civic, sexual or labouring) gay and lesbian subjects of the U.S. state.” This is shown by an analysis of the discourse used by gay rights organisations: “… this type of binary-laden discourse is often used to reframe social issues as palatable neoliberal matters instead of deep-rooted social conditions inherent to the political landscape” as well as the role of the state in shaping discourse: “Through the subtle portrayal of legislative matters as battles between progress-makers and unruly opponents, the DOJ statements convey the judicial system as a passive, is not ahistorical, actor on the sidelines of “culture wars” and partisan debate.”
On the other hand, the queer liberation movement “start[s] [their] political work from the recognition that multiple systems of oppression are in operation and that these systems use institutionalised categories and identities to regulate and socialise.” They engage in “trickle up social justice” by organising from margin-to-centre. This approach stresses that until “the needs of the most vulnerable members of a community are addressed, progress towards other goals simply reinforces the dominance of those people most advantaged”, but when the needs of the most marginal are centred the benefits of activism are shared even by those with greater privilege. They are also calling for us to “readjust our frame on gender justice to really understand the gender spectrum; that it is political and it isn’t based only on people’s individual identities, but actually thinking about gender as a political movement.”
Reformist v Absolutist Ideologies
The split between GRM and QLM reflects a broader ideological split found in organising more widely between absolutist and reformist ideologies. I’m interested in the nuance between this binary - how reform can create feedback loops that drive transformation. “The QDEP mantra of “reform to revolution” - working within the system without losing sight of radical goals - suggests one productive way of recognising, and responding to, this tension in our work.”
“…[there is a] tendency to frame rights in accordance with how relatable to the norm a population is, and not necessarily because of respect for their differences.” I always wonder if this is necessarily a negative thing, or could be used as a strategic advantage. Surely inclusion into the norm also shifts the norm through altering citational discourses? Surely change and acceptance can come about through these incremental shifts? Then the question becomes: is this more strategic than expecting everyone to one day wake up and have the emotional maturity to accept all people regardless of differences? To expect them to revolt and transform the structures we have lived our entire lives under?
Alternatives to mainstream organising include: “seeking to dismantle those state-sanctioned institutions that are used to distribute costs an benefits as opposed to pursuing admission to them, challenging dominant discourses and norms as opposed to operating within their constraints and privileging homonormativity, pursuing economic justice as opposed to legal recognition, building community networks and support groups focused on facilitating grassroots advocacy and local change as opposed to pursuing recognition via state institutions…”
Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC)
“Critiques of the NPIC highlight how neoliberal economic and political norms and structures have created an uneasy relationship between non-profits and the state. Consequently, non-profit-led advocacy can be seen as working to “maintain politics and institutions or oppression” promoted by the state, “while pushing organisations to provide basic services that quell unrest”. Organisations’ reliance on philanthropic funding further privileges the voices and values of wealthy funders, while entrenching clienteles relationships between non-profits, the state, and private capital. The professionalisation of non-profit work has additionally consolidated power in the hands of historically privileged populations, further excluding historically marginalised voices from high-profile, salaried positions within the hierarchically structured NPIC.”
Immigration
One of the intersections where I learnt the most was the intersection between queerness and immigration. Groups who work in this intersection often fight for broader immigration transformation that doesn’t, on its face, appear to be concerned with queerness, but has large flow-on impacts for many queer people. This includes examining “… how citizenship, historically, has… been used to define our proximity to privilege” and that “… the transnational economy that some people benefit from is completely dependent on the suppression of economic autonomy throughout the global south.”
Immigration must be viewed “in the context of imperialism, globalisation and neoliberal capitalism. U.S. interventions, in terms of foreign policy, trade agreements, or support for pro-U.S. regimes (including by military coup) have forced millions of people in Central and South America, Asia, and elsewhere to flee their homes in search of economic and social security.
An advocate from SONG notes “Our people have demanded citizenship as one of the main ways to honour the reality that most undocumented communities are reduced only to labor. This assumption that we’re disposable, and as long as you can stand up and work and produce, then you can be here. In the shadows, but you can be here. And as long as you don’t become a person with disabilities, as long as you’re not queer, as long as all of these other things, because then it’s thank you for your labour and good day.”
“These realities are compounded in sectors with already limited worker protections, like domestic work, where the legacy of slavery and systemic devaluing of women’s (unpaid) labour resulted in exclusion from most major labour laws in the United States.”
This has pushed activists to stop assuming that the state defines safety, and instead defining and performing safety within their communities. They are “… building relationships to each other that are not defined by the state, but are instead defined by our livelihood, our survival, our cultural and political existence.”
Theory
“… this type of binary-laden discourse is often used to reframe social issues as palatable neoliberal matters instead of deep-rooted social conditions inherent to the political landscape”
The claims implicit in the following statement were also intriguing as they suggest that identities that fundamentally challenge binaries are the most vulnerable to oppression: “… homonormativity is especially costly for trans* and intersectionally-subjected individuals whose very existence challenges the binary operationalisation of identity and makes these populations particularly vulnerable to state violence and subjection.” “The articulation of a gay/lesbian-heterosexual binary identity erases bisexuals, pansexuals, queers and trans* individuals from the legal lexicon and the protections of the law.” On the contrary, “Individuals who are genderqueer, genderfluid and gender reject the binary operalization of gender identity in favour of the ability to exercise self-determination across time and space.”
Rights have been extended to sexual orientation on the basis that it is immutable. However, the claim that “sexual orientation is immutable… obscures the fact that for many trans* individuals, gender identity is not a fixed or immutable characteristic.” This limits the protections they can get under current ideological frameworks.
“… law is not simply a set of rules and norms that people learn to obey and follow but rather is a “complex repertoire of discursive strategies and symbolic frameworks that structure ongoing social intercourse and meaning-making activity among citizens.””
The concept of homonormativity was also new to me. Lisa Duggen defines homonormativity as “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a depoliticised gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.”
“Every society regulates sexuality and imposes hierarchies of sexual relations and behaviour. In addition, all states endeavour to control sexual relations and gender roles in order to promote specific forms fo intimacy and kinship.”
We must not ignore the “dangers of basing sexual rights and freedoms on the idea of privacy. This policing criminalises the most sexually marginalised, such as street sex workers, targets those who are visibly queer, such as gender nonconforming and transgender people, and targets those who cruise or have sex in public spaces. It threatens the freedoms of those who don’t have access to private homes, those who are poor, and those who are racially profiled and targeted by the police on a regular basis… we hope there can be a… decrimiliz[ation] of public space.”
Review cont. in comments
This book provided three things for me: (1) a differentiation between the mainstream gay rights movement, defined by single-issue advocacy, homonormativity and reformism, and the radical queer liberation movement, defined by intersectional analysis, margin-to-centre organising and transformative vision; and (2) insight into the intersections between queerness and other social hierarchies and states; and (3) insight into specific organisations, mainly in the U.S. but also in Iran, Turkey, Spain and France.
I enjoyed the various essays, though may have preferred a text that took the next step and processed the different texts into one cohesive text. In saying that, it was probably useful having different voices outlining different contexts.
Marriage
My biggest takeaway was how ridiculous it is that marriage is connected to rights and entitlements in law, privileging certain kinds of relationships over others. It encourages “the maintenance of the nuclear family as a primary organizing and privileging mechanism in U.S. society” and “the concept that material benefits should be awarded and distributed to individuals via state recognition of relationships.” The fight for inclusion of same-sex couples in the institution of marriage ignores the much larger issue: that the institution of marriage is entrenched by the state at all. This entrenchment encourages uncritical adoption of monogamy, rather than intentional shaping of family and romantic relationships as you want them to be. “… [the marriage equality agenda] has always privileged one form of sexual or romantic relationship - coupled, monogamous, private, unpaid - and participated in a sexual culture that demonises and polices other forms of sexuality: hook-ups, multiple partners, non-monogamy, sex work, public sex.” The inclusion of same-sex people in marriage is just the reinforcement and perpetuation of the same old liberal structures. “The narratives that centre marriage - they reduce justice to access, liberation to liberalism, same sex to same old sex. Equality in this narrative is little more a straight people’s club to which queers most willing to conform have gained admission.” This works at cross-purposes with “two of the primary goals of the lesbian and gay movement: the affirmation of gay identity and culture and the validation of many forms of relationships.” Why fight for inclusion rather than deconstruction? Why should greater validity be given to a certain family formation by the state? How does this impact single parents, those who view family as encompassing extended family, those in polyamorous romantic arrangements? How does this perpetuate the organisation of society according to nuclear family rather than wider community?
Marriage also has wider impacts on the political economy: “…marriage and the nuclear family privatize social reproduction and unpaid caregiving work. The financial burden of rearing new generations and caring for the old and the sick, all necessary social functions, is entirely placed on couples and families. While these conditions create huge savings for the wealthy, who don’t have to contribute towards the costs of maintaining a healthy supply of workers or pay for the care of those no longer able to work, they place enormous strains on individuals.”
“It is important to remember that, despite the romantic aura that surrounds it, the institution of marriage remains grounded in a set of private property relations that originated with feudalism, inheritance rights, and the need to control women’s productive and reproductive labour. After the end of feudalism, these property and labour relations were adapted to the capitalist system, a system that relies on state violence domestically (police) and globally (military) to maintain extreme inequality.”
GRM v QLM
It was also devastating to discover that mainstream gay rights organisations and activists in the U.S. had denigrated other forms of family recognition (i.e. domestic partnerships) in the fight for inclusion into marriage, resulting in an erosion of the validity of these alternative forms of recognition. This lead to many local municipalities and businesses revoking these forms of recognition after same-sex marriage was legalised. The fight for marriage “helped build increasingly narrow cultural and legal parameters of family and intimacy.” It was doubly devastating to find that they did not do this through the real stories of queer people - they had to create a narrative of “the ideal gay and lesbian life narrative based on focus-group research that revealed what straight people wanted to hear - a story that would validate and re-affirm the moral rightness of straight people’s own identities and life choices” and then “teach that story to real live queers, so that they could repeat this story back to straight people” including 45 minute training sessions on how to adopt this narrative. This taught them to “refract the complexities of queer lives through the filter of the most stereotypical heteronormative fantasy of marriage.” When you get down to it, “… marriage was positioned for voters as a way to domesticate and control the danger posed by gay sex.”
Overall, this was a burning criticism of gay rights organisations role in perpetuating neo-liberal frameworks through fighting for gay peoples inclusion into them. “In prioritising state-sanctioned recognition of erstwhile queer relationships, institutionalised and de-politicised LGBTQ social movements have effectively functioned to produce, and to police, the proper (civic, sexual or labouring) gay and lesbian subjects of the U.S. state.” This is shown by an analysis of the discourse used by gay rights organisations: “… this type of binary-laden discourse is often used to reframe social issues as palatable neoliberal matters instead of deep-rooted social conditions inherent to the political landscape” as well as the role of the state in shaping discourse: “Through the subtle portrayal of legislative matters as battles between progress-makers and unruly opponents, the DOJ statements convey the judicial system as a passive, is not ahistorical, actor on the sidelines of “culture wars” and partisan debate.”
On the other hand, the queer liberation movement “start[s] [their] political work from the recognition that multiple systems of oppression are in operation and that these systems use institutionalised categories and identities to regulate and socialise.” They engage in “trickle up social justice” by organising from margin-to-centre. This approach stresses that until “the needs of the most vulnerable members of a community are addressed, progress towards other goals simply reinforces the dominance of those people most advantaged”, but when the needs of the most marginal are centred the benefits of activism are shared even by those with greater privilege. They are also calling for us to “readjust our frame on gender justice to really understand the gender spectrum; that it is political and it isn’t based only on people’s individual identities, but actually thinking about gender as a political movement.”
Reformist v Absolutist Ideologies
The split between GRM and QLM reflects a broader ideological split found in organising more widely between absolutist and reformist ideologies. I’m interested in the nuance between this binary - how reform can create feedback loops that drive transformation. “The QDEP mantra of “reform to revolution” - working within the system without losing sight of radical goals - suggests one productive way of recognising, and responding to, this tension in our work.”
“…[there is a] tendency to frame rights in accordance with how relatable to the norm a population is, and not necessarily because of respect for their differences.” I always wonder if this is necessarily a negative thing, or could be used as a strategic advantage. Surely inclusion into the norm also shifts the norm through altering citational discourses? Surely change and acceptance can come about through these incremental shifts? Then the question becomes: is this more strategic than expecting everyone to one day wake up and have the emotional maturity to accept all people regardless of differences? To expect them to revolt and transform the structures we have lived our entire lives under?
Alternatives to mainstream organising include: “seeking to dismantle those state-sanctioned institutions that are used to distribute costs an benefits as opposed to pursuing admission to them, challenging dominant discourses and norms as opposed to operating within their constraints and privileging homonormativity, pursuing economic justice as opposed to legal recognition, building community networks and support groups focused on facilitating grassroots advocacy and local change as opposed to pursuing recognition via state institutions…”
Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC)
“Critiques of the NPIC highlight how neoliberal economic and political norms and structures have created an uneasy relationship between non-profits and the state. Consequently, non-profit-led advocacy can be seen as working to “maintain politics and institutions or oppression” promoted by the state, “while pushing organisations to provide basic services that quell unrest”. Organisations’ reliance on philanthropic funding further privileges the voices and values of wealthy funders, while entrenching clienteles relationships between non-profits, the state, and private capital. The professionalisation of non-profit work has additionally consolidated power in the hands of historically privileged populations, further excluding historically marginalised voices from high-profile, salaried positions within the hierarchically structured NPIC.”
Immigration
One of the intersections where I learnt the most was the intersection between queerness and immigration. Groups who work in this intersection often fight for broader immigration transformation that doesn’t, on its face, appear to be concerned with queerness, but has large flow-on impacts for many queer people. This includes examining “… how citizenship, historically, has… been used to define our proximity to privilege” and that “… the transnational economy that some people benefit from is completely dependent on the suppression of economic autonomy throughout the global south.”
Immigration must be viewed “in the context of imperialism, globalisation and neoliberal capitalism. U.S. interventions, in terms of foreign policy, trade agreements, or support for pro-U.S. regimes (including by military coup) have forced millions of people in Central and South America, Asia, and elsewhere to flee their homes in search of economic and social security.
An advocate from SONG notes “Our people have demanded citizenship as one of the main ways to honour the reality that most undocumented communities are reduced only to labor. This assumption that we’re disposable, and as long as you can stand up and work and produce, then you can be here. In the shadows, but you can be here. And as long as you don’t become a person with disabilities, as long as you’re not queer, as long as all of these other things, because then it’s thank you for your labour and good day.”
“These realities are compounded in sectors with already limited worker protections, like domestic work, where the legacy of slavery and systemic devaluing of women’s (unpaid) labour resulted in exclusion from most major labour laws in the United States.”
This has pushed activists to stop assuming that the state defines safety, and instead defining and performing safety within their communities. They are “… building relationships to each other that are not defined by the state, but are instead defined by our livelihood, our survival, our cultural and political existence.”
Theory
“… this type of binary-laden discourse is often used to reframe social issues as palatable neoliberal matters instead of deep-rooted social conditions inherent to the political landscape”
The claims implicit in the following statement were also intriguing as they suggest that identities that fundamentally challenge binaries are the most vulnerable to oppression: “… homonormativity is especially costly for trans* and intersectionally-subjected individuals whose very existence challenges the binary operationalisation of identity and makes these populations particularly vulnerable to state violence and subjection.” “The articulation of a gay/lesbian-heterosexual binary identity erases bisexuals, pansexuals, queers and trans* individuals from the legal lexicon and the protections of the law.” On the contrary, “Individuals who are genderqueer, genderfluid and gender reject the binary operalization of gender identity in favour of the ability to exercise self-determination across time and space.”
Rights have been extended to sexual orientation on the basis that it is immutable. However, the claim that “sexual orientation is immutable… obscures the fact that for many trans* individuals, gender identity is not a fixed or immutable characteristic.” This limits the protections they can get under current ideological frameworks.
“… law is not simply a set of rules and norms that people learn to obey and follow but rather is a “complex repertoire of discursive strategies and symbolic frameworks that structure ongoing social intercourse and meaning-making activity among citizens.””
The concept of homonormativity was also new to me. Lisa Duggen defines homonormativity as “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a depoliticised gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.”
“Every society regulates sexuality and imposes hierarchies of sexual relations and behaviour. In addition, all states endeavour to control sexual relations and gender roles in order to promote specific forms fo intimacy and kinship.”
We must not ignore the “dangers of basing sexual rights and freedoms on the idea of privacy. This policing criminalises the most sexually marginalised, such as street sex workers, targets those who are visibly queer, such as gender nonconforming and transgender people, and targets those who cruise or have sex in public spaces. It threatens the freedoms of those who don’t have access to private homes, those who are poor, and those who are racially profiled and targeted by the police on a regular basis… we hope there can be a… decrimiliz[ation] of public space.”
Review cont. in comments
April 12, 2019
Defilippis lays out the difference between the mainstream gay rights organizations (fueled by a rich donor base that prioritized gay marriage) and the queer liberation movement groups that approach their work with LGBTQ communities through an intersectional framework that accounts for race, immigration status, gender identity, etc. So much of the inner workings of these camps have shaped how the U.S. debates LGBTQ issues in the public sphere. It was a fascinating read, and I don't think I'll ever look at LGBTQ politics and community organizing the same way again.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews