When We Win We Lose: Mainstreaming and the Redistribution of Respectability

Dean Spade delivers the 2016 CLAGS Kessler Award Lecture, “When We Win We Lose: Mainstreaming and the Redistribution of Respectability.”

Exploring ways of determining if particular reforms or tactics are recuperative or liberatory, Spade offers strategies for moving beyond strategies that deliver only symbolic change. Spade offers a vision of activism and organizing focusing on politicized survival work/mutual aid, dismantling harmful systems, building the world we want, and preparing for disasters in the age of the Trump regime.

The CLAGS Kessler award is given to a scholar who has, over a number of years, produced a substantive body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ Studies. This video also features testimonials by Angela P. Harris, Craig Willse, and Reina Gossett.

Recorded on December 9, 2016 at The CUNY Graduate Center and edited by Hope Dector.