Queer Activism Research Articles

Naked Truths as a Credo of Protest in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States was abounded with darkened repercussions represented by waging wars such as the cold war, the Vietnam War, and the appearance of various ideologies as materialism, consumerism, sexual freedom, racial struggles and many other examples and consequently, new trends and movements appeared to rebel against the conventional norms that prevailed during that time. The rebellion took an upward trajectory crystalizing itself in diverse forms namely: the religious, political, social and literary ones. Unruly politics and queer activisms defied the commonplace hetero-normative ways of peaceful demonstrations. The beat movement burst out against what was believed as repressive, dehumanized, corrupt, and unjust in the United States of America. Allen Ginsberg's monumental poem "Howl" seems to be the manifesto of the movement. Most striking quality is the use of naked truth as an expression of the poet's own eccentricity. This quality makes the poem a landmark of eccentricity. "Howl" reflects and connotes a deeply celestial interpretation. A celestial reading of the poem will mend its presupposed deformed image, prove the opposite, and support the basic theme of protest which is at the center of the beat movement.

Bad Brown Aunties, Fagony Aunts and Resistance Aunties: Centring Queer Desi Aunties in Diasporic Social Movement and Justice Work

This article offers an urgent complement to the trope of the South Asian aunty as an agent of discipline, shame, heteropatriarchy and tradition by exploring the counter-archetype of the resistance aunty—the radical feminist aunty who holds down social movements—in the South Asian diaspora. This article centres a queer lens on transgressive and activist aunties, and analyses digital and in-person queerings of the aunty in contemporary social and cultural movements. Examining resistance aunties in the writing, performances, interviews and other digital and in-person cultural work of four queer South Asians in the US and the UK, this article asserts the aunty as a core agent of resistance. It develops the notion of the resistance aunty in conversation with activist aunting in Black American organising and scholarship, and locates the legacy of the resistance aunty in queer and trans movements in the Global South and in the diaspora. By applying a new theoretics of resistance auntyhood to studies of aunty labour, this article argues for the importance of queer activist aunties in nurturing and propelling transformative social movements.

In Search of a Queerer Law: Two People’s Tribunals in 1976

ABSTRACT In 1976, two people’s tribunals took place which considered issues relating to non-normative sexuality. ‘People’s tribunals’ are civil society initiatives that assert a popular jurisdiction which operates outside of both the state and international institutions. In Brussels, there was the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women, which treated ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ as a crime. On the other side of the world, in Sydney, there was the Tribunal on Homosexuals and Discrimination. These people’s tribunals are sometimes treated as forerunners to later developments relating to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) rights in international law. In this paper, by contrast, I engage in a queer reading of the Brussels and Sydney Tribunals, whereby I consider how the legal framings and procedures adopted by the two tribunals diverged from the LGBTI rights framework that would later develop. In doing so, my aim is to shine a light on alternative, queerer legal possibilities, as well as to open up a conversation about using people’s tribunals as a mode of queer activism into the future.

Las otras memorias de Gio Infante: repensar la homotransfobia y la violencia política en el Perú contemporáneo

Queer activist Gio Infante was one of the most lucid voices of the Peruvian social movements. At the age of 31, Infante’s early death stopped a political and intellectual becoming that deserves to be revisited. Cultivating Gio Infante’s memories is an effort to dispute the problematic desires for social normalization of some LGBTQ subjects and, more importantly, to dare to imagine queer horizons in which their lives are not socially and materially determined by violence. This article offers a close reading of Infante’s essay, “The Other Memories: Persecution, Torture, and Death of Homosexuals During the Internal Armed Conflict” (“Las otras memorias: persecución, tortura y muerte de homosexuales durante el conflicto armado interno”), published in 2013. Infante invites us to nurture painful and subversive memories that allow us to glimpse political and affective anti-racist, feminist and queer coalitions. For Infante, the material conditions for imagining a queer peace do not yet exist in the present. Instead, Infante mobilizes the other memories as an analytic that allows him to open the past’s virtualities, to try to repair political violence’s anonymizing effect. In opposition to homonormative articulations and right-wing political consensuses, Infante tirelessly argues for the need to think critically about the material conditions of production, reproduction, and reification of homotransphobia in the present.

To talk as if they had a manifesto in their mouth

The act of writing and/or reading a manifesto is inherently political: bearing the weight of historical struggles and contemporary aspirations. Situating the camera inside my mouth, this video art piece reclaims the manifesto as an intimate, visceral experience, grounding it in the physicality of the body. This artistic approach invites the viewer to traverse the blurred boundaries between reader and performer, queerness and academia, provoking contemplation on the deeply personal and subjective nature of the inside of my mouth. My body is a manifestation of queer activism and activity, highlighting that it’s not merely about the words spoken but the understanding rooted in life experiences and embodied knowledge. As I read my The Southern Butthole Manifesto with a dildo camera inside my mouth, the words become unintelligible, mirroring the material, historical, and experiential complexities inherent in the manifesto’s message. This deliberate refusal to be clearly understood underscores the challenge of understanding, akin to the difficulty of comprehending the manifold layers of my queer experience as someone from the global south based in the global north (where interpretations of my body differ significantly.) Reflecting on the expectations such as “learn German to get a better job”, or “if you don’t speak English, you won’t be part of the international art market”, or “if you don’t change your voice, you will never have a partner”, or “you need to change the way you speak to stay here” (it was at the end of my first semester in Social Sciences, in 1998), reinforces the disparities in how my body and voice are perceived in these two contrasting worlds. The division between South and North transcends mere geopolitics; it extends into the realm of discourse, influencing our experiences, freedoms, movements, and ways of being. These discourses shape our possibilities, our accesses, and our ways to be understood. Consequently, when my southern language is not comprehended by northern ears, I grapple with the question: What should I do? In response to Gayatri Spivak’s query about whether the subaltern can speak, I affirm yes, the subaltern can speak. The issue lies in the unwillingness of those in power to listen. To maintain this lack of receptivity, they have devised tools that are intentionally inscrutable, elusive, and inaccessible. While some embrace so-called “science” with its narratives and empirical evidence, others rely on whispers, prayers, and dreams to understand the world beyond its surface. The question here is what holds more significance: what is said, what is heard, who is speaking, within or outside the confines of the mouth, what is sense, or what the eyes perceive. This multifaceted work challenges conventional perceptions of language and communication, inviting viewers to delve into the intricacies of embodied knowledge and the relentless struggle for recognition in the face of linguistic, political and geographical disparities.

Activism and Agency: Reflections on Emergent Queer Life Writing from Sub-Saharan Africa

This article examines how queer authors from sub-Saharan Africa use writing about their lives to expose the vulnerabilities that they face in their specific communities and how they try to elude the restrictions of homophobia in their activism. I read Siya Khumalo’s You Have to be Gay to Know God (2018) and Brian Pellot’s edited collection Hopes and Dreams that Sound Like Yours: Stories of Queer Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa (2021) as autobiographical testimonies that explore means of queer activism in sub-Saharan Africa’s homophobic publics to challenge the sustenance of homophobia by dismantling its systematic ideological structures of power differentials in these societies. By championing activism, African queer writers engage in a process of creating new subjectivities that demand rights and visibility for their unthreatened presence on the continent. I argue that these life stories suggest that queer activism in sub-Saharan Africa ought to be multidimensional, inclusive, and cross-sectional to circumvent the prohibitions and restrictive forces of heteropatriarchy. The narratives also reveal that activism can become therapy and a source of resilience in the face of homophobia.

PERFORMING IDENTITIES, SEXUALITIES AND PLEASURES: A TRIBUTE TO LEO BERSANI (1931-2022)

On 20 February 2022, Leo Bersani, who has been one of the leading philosophers, literary critics and intellectuals in gender and sexuality studies, passed away at the age of 90. In this essay, I shall draw attention to Leo Bersani’s theoretical oeuvre and attempt to offer a critical assessment of his major contributions to the field of LGBTIQ+ studies. The essay reveals that Bersani’s ideas concerning sexual identities, gender relations and somatic pleasures, and their relations with psyche, society, politics, families, and laws not only broaden the scope of understanding the complex phenomenon of human sexualities, but also underline the incomprehensibility of this phenomenon. This essay is divided into three small parts: Bersani’s life, works and death, his career as a literary critic, and his queer activism in literary and political circle. The essay also details Bersani’s intellectual journey, critical insights, and political engagements, defending human inclination towards pleasure and sexual freedom against the backdrop of socio-political tensions which emerged during the height of AIDS epidemic in America.

Politics and Poetics

Politics and Poetics

Black Queer Activism During the Aids Epidemic

The history of LGBTQ Americans has frequently been told through the lens of White Queer individuals , and most Black American historiography fails to acknowledge the contributions that Black Queer Americans have made to end racial discrimination. Several publications throughout the 1980s demonstrate the efforts that Black Queer Americans have made in the fight against racism and homophobia that plagued the United States.

The Spanish Lesbian Collective LSD: A Closer Look to Their Video-Essay Retroalimentación (1998)

In 1993, the group LSD (Lesbianas sin duda / Lesbians without a doubt) was created in Madrid. It was a collective of artivists including Itziar Okariz Virginia Villaplana, Fefa Vila, Azucena Vietes, Marisa Maza, and Liliana Couso, among others. They met in the downtown neighbourhood of Lavapiés to publish magazines and fanzines such as Bollozine or Non Grata, dedicated to film, music, photography, and the Spanish queer art scene overall. In addition, they carried out two photographic projects that are already part of the national lesbian imaginary: Es-Cultura lesbiana and Monstruosidades. This collective, which uses artistic channels for activism, takes a model of a community that is no longer a conqueror of rights (liberalism) but rather a destroyer of all aspects of a hierarchical society.
 Queer activism is located at the margins of representation, understood as “an abject margin full of monsters, in which race, class and sex are mixed, ready to come to light and destabilize the dominant discourses" (García, 2016, p. 162). Violence is no longer understood individually but within a social structure. Some of these artists later continued their careers with video actions and performances in public places, exposing their bodies and thus problematising their gender and sexual orientation, as several of them contributed to the visibility of lesbians in Spain at the turn of the century. 
 This article analyses the photographic and collage work of the Spanish lesbian collective LSD, taking as object of study the video essay Retroalimentación (1998), made by the LSD member Virginia Villaplana.

Innovation Despite Backsliding—the Importance of the Events of 7th August 2020 for Polish LGBTQIA Youth

In this paper, I analysed the events of 7th August 2020 in Warsaw, when 48 people were detained by the Polish police who brutally raided solidarity demonstration with non-binary activist Margot Szutowicz. The aim of the paper is to explore queer activism in Poland on microsociological level using Gabriel Tarde imitation theory. I tried to show how individual experience of resistance gave rise to new, innovative forms of activism which became a social phenomenon. In my research, I used in-depth interviews with some of detainees and over 180 diaries/memoirs of Polish LGBTQIA people.

The Doubly Discriminated in the Land of the Free: Exclusion and Empowerment of Queer People of Color from the 1960s to Modern America

This paper explores the double ostracization queer Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) endured in history, as an intersectional result of racist exclusion in the predominantly white narrative of the gay liberation movement and homophobia within oppressed racial groups. It describes how this double discrimination led to disproportionate impacts on the community in the AIDS epidemic from 1980s to 1990s. In the process, the paper restores the erased narratives of queer activists of color, showing how this community united to resist the double discrimination and to speak up through literature and alliances that ultimately overcame some of the societal barriers. Looking forward, the paper argues that a similar pattern is emerging in contemporary America with a disproportionate impact on queer and BIPOC people through the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Drawing on these insights, the paper concludes with the progress the American society has made toward equity for all.

Geschlecht und Geschlechterverhältnisse bewegen: Queer/Feminismen zwischen Widerstand, Subversion, und Solidarität ed. by Verena Sperk et al.

Reviewed by: Geschlecht und Geschlechterverhältnisse bewegen: Queer/Feminismen zwischen Widerstand, Subversion, und Solidarität ed. by Verena Sperk et al. Simone Pfleger Verena Sperk, Sandra Altenberger, Katharina Lux, and Tanja Vogler, editors. Geschlecht und Geschlechterverhältnisse bewegen: Queer/Feminismen zwischen Widerstand, Subversion, und Solidarität. transcript Verlag, 2020. 218 pp. Paper, €40. Inspired by Sara Ahmed's call to embrace living a feminist life in her book of the same name and to face injustices as a collective, Geschlecht und Geschlechterverhältnisse bewegen: Queer/Feminismen zwischen Widerstand, Subversion, und Solidarität (Shifting gender and gender relations: Queer/Feminisms and resistance, subversion, and solidarity), with its nine contributions, addresses sociohistorical and cultural phenomena and discursive interventions into contemporary feminist theory and activism. Underscoring that gender and gender relations are not only the object of research but are categories that are constantly in flux and transforming, the editors argue for the separation of feminist and queer analyses in order to avoid the latter being subsumed within the former. They call for resistance, subversion, and solidarity as modes of feminist critique to offer multiperspectival approaches to gender and gender relations by engaging feminist critiques of subjectivity, queer theorizing and its politics, postcolonial theory, body studies, mad studies, and intersectionality. Eliah Lüthi's contribution engages with trans* and mad studies in order to argue for an examination of the depathologization of trans* individuals and the repeated and ongoing practices of exclusion of certain trans* bodies. Arguing that norms are defined through and rely on an Other that serves as the referential counterpart, Lüthi considers changes in the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the European International Classification for Diseases since the mid-1970s, emphasizing that trans* as a category has undergone processes of pathologization, its subsequent depathologization, and repathologization. [End Page 127] In her contribution, Tanja Voglers examines the relationship between the queer politics of Christopher Street Day (CSD) and the memory culture linked to the Stonewall riots. Relying on discourse analysis of texts and images, she underscores how the Stonewall riots are considered the starting point of gay and lesbian activism by many activists as well as academics. However, this particular construction of a whitewashed gay and lesbian history eclipses the fact that queer activism and organizing predates Stonewall and that race played a significant role in the riots of the 1960s but is often overlooked in mainstream discourses. Using LesMigraS as an example of an organization that positions itself in critical opposition to the CSD celebrations in Germany, Voglers emphasizes how certain groups are unable to participate in CSD because they do not see themselves represented in the program yet wish to feel more welcome (again). Andrea Urthaler turns to the feminist movement in Southern Tyrol in her article and shows that it has existed since the 1970s. She argues that the movement needs to be interrogated in relation to space, gender, and power, and draws a connection between private and public places and spaces. Urthaler points out that the feminist movement contributed to the creation of women's shelters, archives, libraries, and so on, and thus caused significant changes to some spaces in the city of Bozen. Verena Sperk focuses on the harmful potential of humor and laughter and the normalization of injurious language. However, she argues, humor can also be understood as a mode of transformation, since it holds the potential for resistance and feminist intervention. Using the stand-up show Nanette by Hannah Gatsby as an example, Sperk underscores that comedy can walk a fine line between being demeaning and having the power to unsettle hegemonic structures. The volume's final contribution, by Alexa Baumgartner, examines the Austrian avant-garde architecture movement of the 1960s and 1970s and asks how certain avant-garde buildings have the capacity to deconstruct gender relations. Leaning on contemporary posthumanist and queer feminist theories, she underscores that architecture offers the possibility to rethink bodies in relation to the materiality of buildings, but she cautions that many of the installations do not call into question traditional gender dynamics such as heteronormativity. Overall, the volume is a valuable contribution to feminist and queer scholarship and touches upon a variety of...

The Reputation of Edward II, 1305–1697: A Literary Transformation of History by Kit Heyem

Reviewed by: The Reputation of Edward II, 1305–1697: A Literary Transformation of History by Kit Heyem Laurel Zwissler kit heyem. The Reputation of Edward II, 1305–1697: A Literary Transformation of History. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2020. Pp. 347. Medieval England's Edward II was bewitched into sodomy! At least that is how some of his contemporaries understood the situation. In The Reputation of Edward II, literary historian and queer activist Kit Heyem (they/them) investigates multiple threads that form Edward's constructed reputation. "Reputations" becomes more accurate wording: Heyem deftly demonstrates [End Page 363] that regardless of the ultimate unknowability of who Edward II really was and what he actually did, least of all in bed, his story has been deployed in a great number of ways through the last nine hundred years. He has been an exemplum of misrule via favoritism, a righteous king foully martyred by traitors, and a queer forebear. The goal of the book is not to resolve these contradictions, but instead to trace their origins and development through the textual tradition around Edward II, starting with his contemporaries (1305), through Christopher Marlowe's notorious play (1592), to literary critics today. Heyem does so with both meticulous attention to detail and engaging wit. Along the way, they touch on many topics of interest to Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft readers, including inversion narratives, love magic, and scholarly assumptions about literary genres and cultural transmission. Appearing in the series "Gendering the Late Medieval and Modern World," through Amsterdam University Press, The Reputation of Edward II is the first monograph for Heyem, currently Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Queen Mary University of London. The book builds on their existing scholarship not so much in subject but in methodology, creatively rethinking historiography of gender and sexuality. Heyem is clear that the continued fascination with Edward II's reign, fall, and murder comes from interwoven associations of sexual and political transgression and, while not the exclusive focus of the book, their co-symbolism with inversion narratives of evil, such as riot, misrule, and sodomy. Heyem introduces the sketched narrative of Edward II's life. Known for intense emotional attachments to male favorites, Edward is eventually deposed by disgruntled nobles supporting his wife and infant son. Initially imprisoned, he dies mysteriously, most likely murdered, probably by suffocation. If, having read this far, you are thinking to yourself, "That is definitely not how I heard he died," then you already know that within a generation, the popular story emerges that he was, instead, killed through the anal insertion of a hot poker, understood at the time as a clandestine execution, leaving no external marks on the body. In the years since, however, this elaborate story of execution has accreted a sense of "sexual mimesis," as gruesome parody of the sodomy for which Edward was also simultaneously, if posthumously, becoming infamous. The book is structured thematically, investigating "key preoccupations" within medieval and early modern narratives (26). The first chapter mobilizes queer linguistic historiography to investigate the usefulness of terms, such as "riot" and "minion," preferred over the more rarely used "sodomy," to imply that Edward II transgressed sexually, perhaps with men, but to leave [End Page 364] authors with "plausible deniability" for the charge (35). Chapter 2 focuses more specifically on the development of the explicit idea that Edward's more general reputation for sexual transgression and his reputation for having inappropriate attachments to male favorites collapsed into a specific reputation for sexual transgressions with those very male favorites themselves, a process which Marlowe's play culminates. Chapter 3 looks more closely at Edward's relationship with Gaveston, his childhood friend and first favorite, and the ways that, despite their simultaneous condemnation, early modern chroniclers and even Marlowe himself romanticize their pairing, offering surprisingly positive, if tragic, depictions of same-sex love. Chapter 4 brings us to bewitchment. Heyem cleverly connects not only the genre of "evil counsel" literature, but also kings' "mistress complaint," to contemporaries' writing about Gaveston. In it, he is often depicted as uncannily beautiful and irresistible, perhaps witchily so (see especially 147–51 for connections to male witches and demonology). The political purpose that witchcraft...

Introduction

Abstract Gender-based violence, (geo)politics, and Islam continue to dominate the production of knowledge about Central Asia. While using a gender lens, this Special Issue offers a different perspective on the region. The authors link historical analyses of imperial and Soviet gendered modernities to contemporary Central Asians’ daily lives and local nationalisms to shed light on often overlooked areas in the literature, such as a systematic screening out of historical and contemporary gender diversity, sex work, virginity tests, in-bodiment (as in corporeality, not just the performance of social norms,) queer activism, and the use and abuse of discourse on traditions. As a platform for a conversation about negotiating gender in Central Asia and indigenizing gender theory from within other than Euro-American contexts, this Issue is an example of knowledge production by and with Central Asians. This Issue is also an invitation to continue using a gender lens, as there are still several research areas that remain unexplored and would, we believe, benefit from such an approach.

The powers of silence: Making sense of the non-definition of gender in international criminal law

AbstractSilence has often been studied in international law as a mechanism tied to passivity and oppression. In this study, I propose an exploration of other ontologies of silence by unravelling its possibilities as an active mechanism, namely: (i) a tool for resistance; and (ii) a linguistic device for managing disagreement. For this, I use as an exploratory ground the construction of a non-definition of gender for the crime of persecution in international criminal law (ICL). Analysing the Rome Statute negotiations, I examine how gender-conservative actors successfully opposed the proposal for a non-definition of gender, arguing that such a solution would harm the clarity required by the principle of legality in ICL. By establishing that legal rules must be clear, specific, and cohesive, I argue that the legality principle imposes a burden of speech upon non-state voices in ICL, one that encircles them within a subalternity scheme where speech is demanded but can only be performed or mediated by states. Exploring the negotiations of the Convention on Crimes Against Humanity draft, I examine how the non-definition of gender allowed feminist and queer activists to resist such a burden of speech for the conceptualization of gender. Simultaneously, silence also provided an opportunity for International Law Commission members to propose a draft that avoids cacophony around a contentious term. By reflecting on the active roles of silence, this study contributes to new modes of analysing resistance to dominant modes of legal discourse, as well as exploring dynamics of order(ing) in international law-making.

Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights By Kanika Batra

Reviewed by: Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights by Kanika Batra Carli Coetzee Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights KANIKA BATRA Routledge, 2022. ISBN 9780367772109 paper. Kanika Batra's ambitious monograph Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics Counterpublics, Human Rights makes an intervention in a number of fields, complicating and nuancing existing conversations. It has been awarded the Subversive Histories, Feminist Futures prize, a collaboration with the National Women's Studies Association. The argument of the book is that postcolonial studies as a field of inquiry will be richer if it pays attention to feminist and LGBTQ print media for what they reveal about the located histories of gender and sexuality. The archive on which Batra draws is mainly pre-digital, and it is a salutary reminder that despite the optimistic belief that the internet contains all knowledge, there are important and vital archives that remain outside of these networked knowledge systems. Batra locates her archive in three distinct but linked Global South contexts, which allows her to think comparatively across spaces, but also to map common ground. This is an important methodological component of the work, and one that is hugely inspirational for those scholars and activists exploring the kind of Global South solidarities that are possible. The book is invested in the formation of feminist and queer organizational and print networks, and Batra shows how these networks have played a vital role in the direction taken by feminist-queer activism in more recent years. The archive of magazines and newsletters shows, she argues, the modes through which postcolonial feminist and queer activists created regional, national, and transnational alliances. The materiality of the archives, and the state in which she is able to encounter and access them, adds an additional layer to her smart and engaged analysis. Through the reflections on and analyses of these archives, Batra builds for the reader a lens through which to examine and question hegemonic discourses such as the heterosexual bias in transnational feminist thinking. Her reading of the archive is intent on the activists' search for common ground, but her keen eye is able to detect the nuanced disagreements, responses, and debates through which this commonality is found, made, and remade. The argument of the book loops forwards and backwards, asking probing questions about the forms of activism that have flourished or withered and about [End Page 150] how the print archives that form her primary source materials can be used to help us understand the formation of publics and counter-publics. She uses the evocative and useful phrase of "semi-remembered counter-publics," an injunction to activists and scholars to reenter these archives in order to generate questions that will in turn reconvene counter-publics who resist hegemonic models. The book has a three-part structure, each of the three sections geographically centered, and collectively mapping transnational feminist and queer "worldmaking and world-shifting" practices and activities. Part 1 is titled "Abeng, Challenging Depravation," and its focus is on Jamaica. The two linked chapters develop an argument that illustrates that while there are continuities between women's gay and lesbian activism, these continuities do not always guarantee harmonious solidarity. Part 2, "Azadi, Emerging Freedoms," moves the focus to India, and this section includes as one of its highlights: a nuanced and extremely useful discussion of the over-used (and often misused) concept "subaltern." In this section Batra challenges the charge, which has often been made, that Indian gay and lesbian identities are imitations of Western lifestyles. In the contextual attention to a term such as subaltern, and in the mapping of Indian LGBTQ+ and feminist histories in India, the scholarship shows an immersion into the located histories of these forms of activism and an ability to see both continuities and change across time. In section 3, called "Amandla, Embodying Power," Batra focuses on South Africa and develops one of her main arguments, namely that these networks do not mimic but instead pose a challenge to Euro-American definitions of terms such as "queer" and that the networks call for specificity in the development of such terminologies. This is an important point as it helps us to formulate responses to universalizing assumptions about...

Review: Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism, by Marc Stein

Review: <i>Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism</i>, by Marc Stein

Spacialising and Contextualising the Queer Movement in India: A Book Review of Naisargi N. Dave's Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics through a Philosophical Anthropological Perspective

Spacialising and Contextualising the Queer Movement in India: A Book Review of Naisargi N. Dave's Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics through a Philosophical Anthropological Perspective

Quiet politics: Queer organizing in corporate Singapore

How could queer activism for social change be possible in an authoritarian but neoliberal environment? What does neoliberalism imply for queer struggles in non-Western contexts where liberal democracy is absent or non-existent? This article introduces the concept of ‘quiet politics’ to establish a new theoretical lens for understanding queer organizing under global capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interview data on the rise of corporate diversity activism in Singapore, it analyzes how queer employees navigate the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism in multinational corporations. The concept of quiet politics helps us understand the nuanced ways in which queer subjects ‘quietly’ mobilize themselves through a negotiation of neoliberalism, queer politics, and the authoritarian government that persecutes homosexuality. In doing so, this article challenges the Western notion of queer liberalism and sheds new light on the complex entanglement of neoliberal capitalism, corporate diversity, contentious politics, and queer activism from a global perspective.