Joy, Rage, and Activism: The Gendered Politics of Affect in the Young Lords Party

Abstract

This article examines the integral role of affect in feminist and decolonial social movements. Looking at the strategic interplay between two affective modes—rage and joy—in the Young Lords’ activism and organizing from 1969 to 1972, it argues that the organization was exceptional in understanding how affect animates and is animated by social movements. Specifically, the article focuses on the Women’s Caucus (later Women’s Union) of the Young Lords, which scholars have praised as one of the most successful examples of feminist organizing within the decolonial and nationalist movements of the 1960s and ’70s. The Women’s Caucus provides an early model of feminist organizing that emphasizes the important role that affects play in creating activist community. Their attention to affect allowed them to construct strategic ways of combining rage and joy that, along with making their activism sustainable, also paved the way for nonhegemonic performances of gender. The article argues that the feminist restructuring of the Young Lords in 1970, led by the Women’s Caucus, ushered in a more egalitarian organizational structure, in part through the way it centered the role of affects related to rage and joy in political organizing. As a result of this, the Women’s Caucus provided a model for decolonial feminist praxis that creates alternate forms of kinship, prioritizes care of self and community, and claims public space for nontraditional performances of femininity and masculinity.