Have you been thinking recently that it’s time for a new queer agenda beyond marriage equality, but you’re not sure how to articulate what that agenda should be or what it would look like? Well that’s okay, because a group of intelligent, eloquent humans were kind of thinking the same thing, and they went ahead and put together a special double issue of The Scholar & Feminist Online so the rest of us can read all about it.
Titled “A New Queer Agenda,” the issue is a collaboration between Barnard Center for Research on Women and Queers for Economic Justice and aims to illuminate how activists, academics, and organizers can work together to build a more effective and inclusive social justice movement.
photo by Syd London via A New Queer Agenda
The issue itself is a collection of essays that the group started working on during the Bush era, and which have now been organized into three comprehensive parts. Part 1: Queer Issues, Queer Visions, Part 2: Profiles, Interviews, and Narratives, and Part 3: Campaigns and Organizing Efforts are all part of the large issue which is available for free online and is well worth a read. What can you expect from this publication? The preface, written by Lisa Duggan and Richard Kim, promises readers the following:
“A New Queer Agenda” proposes a new set of issues for a revitalized queer movement with a global democratic vision, reaching across lines of race, ethnicity, gender and gender expression, class, religion, and nationality…The goal of this issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online is to forward the process of forging active transnational collaborations among queer progressive and left projects…Each essay, interview, and document constitutes a snapshot of a moment in political organizing at the start of the twenty-first century. Our collection of them here is an effort to connect the dots, and to bring all the local efforts into dialogue and full global visibility.
If you want to hear more about the issue from the contributors themselves at an “evening of politics, discussion, and celebration” (and you happen to live in New York City) you should attend the journal launch and celebration on September 19, 6pm. It’s co-sponsored by Queers for Economic Justice and The Center for Gender and Sexuality at NYU, and takes place at NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor. Contributors Lisa Duggan, Kenyon Farrow, Amber Hollibaugh, and Richard Kim will be present, and they will discuss “push[ing] beyond the platform of security and belonging offered by gay marriage to a broader politics of economic, political, and sexual justice for all.” I actually can’t attend because of work-related commitments (spoiler alert: sometimes Being A Grown Up sucks) but it sounds like it’s going to be a fascinating evening, so if you can go you should, and then you should tell me all about it!
This sounds exciting, wish I wasn’t in the southeast inistead of the northeast.
i once had dinner with kenyon farrow.
Attended this. Seems like same old same old – academics furthering their careers by “pushing to the head of the crowd” but very little energy or new ideas there.