Manon Tremblay, David Paternotte and Carol Johnson, eds, The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State: Comparative Insights into a Transformed Relationship.

Abstract

Manon Tremblay, David Paternotte, and Carol Johnson, eds, The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State: Comparative Insights into a Transformed Relationship. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011, 234 pp. $99.95 hardcover (978-1-4094-1066-9) If you are interested in sex and the state, this may be the book for you. The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State tackles crucial questions concerning how queer movements have affected state relations, and how state relations have transformed queer organizing and communities. In chapters ranging over the globe from Argentina, South Africa, Poland, Canada, France, and the Netherlands to India, Brazil, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, this is a unique collection of national and regional studies of the engagement of queer movements against and within state relations. For scholars and informed activists it is a necessary read, giving us a sense of queer organizing in diverse nation states. The book gives readers a sense of both the diversities and commonalties of organizing around the globe. This book very usefully extends science, sociology, and social movement studies to address lesbian and gay organizing; it enables readers to see how movements have been shaped by the particular institutional and cultural contexts in which they operate. A number of chapters contain crucial (if often short) movement histories from which I learned a great deal. Oriented around a useful Introduction that sets the stage for the book and ending with a reflective Conclusion also by Tremblay, Paternotte and Johnson, the collection takes up a comparative science and social movement studies orientation; this is shaped by analysis of political opportunity and sometimes multiinstitutional analysis. Such an approach has the benefits of bringing important aspects of queer movement/state relations into focus with an emphasis on how specific features of legal, federal, and institutional state relations shape the terrains of queer struggle. At the same time this approach with its focus on institutional structures can shift our attention away from grass roots movement organizing. Like much social movement theorizing, it tends to produce queer movements as external objects to be studied and classified. Many of the chapters provide crucial insights into the relation between queer movements and the state, including queers and the left, the significance of AIDS organizing, the relation between queer struggles and other struggles against oppression, and vital questions regarding the relevance of Western queer theorizing to struggles in the global South. Readers learn about the left (and sometimes revolutionary left) origin of liberation organizing in Argentina, Brazil, Spain, and other countries. This has often been forgotten in mainstream gay organizing in the North and West. The major impact of the social and state response to AIDS in facilitating connections between gay organizing and state relations is explicated, including for India and Brazil. One of the most important chapters for me was the chapter on South Africa by Croucher; it summarizes how queer organizing in support of Black gay activist Simon Nkoli (arrested as part of a rebellion against apartheid) and against apartheid more generally in the 1980s helped to create the basis for the African National Congress as the new postapartheid government officially supporting sexual orientation protection. As part of this struggle, the white-dominated Gay Association of South Africa--which refused to support Simon Nkoli and to oppose apartheid--was suspended from the International Lesbian and Gay Association. Offord's exploration of developments in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore questions whether organizing in these places can be understood through the concepts designed for queer organizing in the West and North and supports the call for decolonizing queer studies. I only wish there had been more about this in this collection. …