240098 UE Guided Reading (2022S)

CONTENTS
In this course we will engage with some of the most salient issues in the field of LGBTQ activism(s) and look for analytical tools that can help us understand the sphere of queer-related struggles for justice and equality.

Throughout our six encounters we will follow the developmental trajectory of the LGBTQ movement from its revolutionary claims in the 1960s and 1970s to today's homonormativity and homonationalism. As we do this, we will examine the major challenges posed by identity politics and try to see why it is that painful disagreements arise among people who we would expect to be united around similar political goals.

While we discuss various facets of activist undertakings, we will foster academic-activist interactions and explore what these two modes of engaging with the social world, often perceived as separate, could learn from each other.

COURSE OBJECTIVES
Students should come away with an understanding of the main debates, key concepts and theories of LGBTQ activism. This is a broad and complex field where sexuality, gender, law, nation, race, and class intertwine. After the course, you should ideally know where to start in case you want to pursue these topics further.

TOPIC OVERVIEW
WEEK 1: Introduction: Who Are “We”?
In this session we will start getting to know each other, take a look at the structure of the course, and discuss course requirements. We will also engage with definitions of activism and activist politics and touch upon the notions of equality, liberation, and emancipation which will accompany us throughout the course.

WEEK 2: Sexual Revolutions
In 1971, a group of London-based activists gathered around the so-called Gay Liberation Front and came up with an agenda for a non-violent revolution in cultural values. They criticized pretty much everything: “homophobia, sexism, marriage, the nuclear family, monogamy, the cults of youth and beauty, patriarchy, and rigid male and female gender roles”. In our second session we will explore this sweeping alternative vision of how society and relationships within it should be organized.

WEEK 3: Lesbian Feminism
In their famous manifesto “The Woman-Identified Woman”, the New York activist collective Radicalesbians defined a lesbian woman as “the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion”. In our third session we will look at the ways in which lesbian activists harnessed this explosive force to respond both to lesbians’ invisibility within the women’s movement as well as to the failure of Pride Parades to be inclusive spaces that contest patriarchy, capitalism, and intense de-politicization of LGBT issues.

WEEK 4: Trans Politics
The Argentinian-US American feminist philosopher Maria Lugones argues that the gender binary system, in the way in which it was imposed on colonized populations around the world, was infused with racist Eurocentrism. Binary sexual difference, according to her, is a colonial invention with distinctly racializing functions. With this in mind, we will dedicate our fourth session to thinking about developments of trans activist engagement along two lines: the ways in which gender has been historically embedded in binary-patriarchal-colonial matrices and today’s rapid diffusion of transgender as a notion stemming from white Eurocentred modernity.

WEEK 5: Homonormativity and Queer Anticapitalism
Our fifth session zooms in on the ways in which neoliberal capitalism has impacted the development of LGBT activist strategies privileging white middle-class lesbians and gay men in the Global North. We will focus on what kind of activist possibilities emerge in this context for articulating anticapitalist queer politics.

WEEK 6: (Re)thining Homonationalism
In our final session we will take a look at how homosexuality has become a criterion of proper citizenship and look at the implications of the fact that some states use their ‘gay friendliness’ as a basis for exclusion and discrimination.