New Writing and Videos
I have gotten a bit behind at posting new work. Many new things have come out.
First, the new edition of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law is out from Duke University Press. It includes new reflecting on the mainstreaming of trans politics and new cover art by Xylor Jane.
Normal Life was published last month in Spanish from Bellaterra Press. You can find Una Vida Normal here.
In other translations news, I had a wonderful visit to the Center for the Study of Sexualities at the National Central University of Taiwan. My generous hosts translated some of my writing to Mandarin. Here is Chapter 2 of Normal Life, “What’s Wrong with Rights?” in Mandarin. Here is the article I co-authored with Morgan Bassichis and Alex Lee that appears in Captive Genders, “Building an Abolitionist Trans & Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got” translated to Mandarin. And here is an article with some US trans law basics in Mandarin.
My documentary Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back! (1 hour long) came out in the summer of 2015. You can watch the entire film on the website and you can watch with captions in English, Spanish or Greek captions (Mandarin is coming soon!).
We also made short clips that address particular topics that are easy to share. These include “What is Pinkwashing?” “What is Brand Israel?” and “What is Normalization?” I put all of these and the full documentary online hoping that people will do free screenings in their own communities and on their campuses. I am happy to report that the documentary has already screened at festivals and community events around the United States and in Canada, Argentina, Japan, Korea, Greece, Holland and in the UK. It is playing on Cambridge Community Television tomorrow! You can read a review of the Pinkwashing Exposed in the recent issue of Make/Shift magazine.
Last month, The Scholar and the Feminist Online published a special issue co-edited by Soniya Munshi and Craig Willse, entitled “Navigating Neoliberalism in the Academy, Non-Profits and Beyond.” It is full of great articles and I highly recommend the whole issue. It includes a new article I co-wrote with Dr. Rori Rohlfs called “Legal Equality and the (After?)Math of Eugenics” that looks critically at the proliferation of new statistics about LGBT populations and how they are used in legal reform efforts. The special issue also includes six more short videos in the series that Hope Dector and I are making as part of our Queer Dreams and Nonprofit Blues project.
Finally, in November I participated in an Oxford Union Debate about whether states should recognize marriage. It was probably among the most uncomfortable events of my life, not only because I was wearing a tuxedo but also because I was on the “same side” of the debate with a raging zionist and a raging transphobe. Still not sure what to make of all that, but if you want to see what I said, here is the video.
Legal Equality, Gay Numbers and the (After?)Math of Eugenics, co-authored with Rori Rohlfs
I wrote this essay, “Legal Equality, Gay Numbers and the (After?)Math of Eugenics” with Rori Rohlfs for S&F Online: Navigating Neoliberalism in the Academy, Nonprofits, and Beyond, edited by Soniya Munshi and Craig Willse, in 2016. You can read it here.
Too Queer To Be Square
I published a short essay in the new book, After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation, edited by Carolyn D’Cruz and Mark Pendleton. The book reflects on the 40th anniversary of the publication of Dennis Altman’s Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation.
My essay, “Too Queer to Be Square,” looks at how queer politics has conservatized in the last 40 years and what queer and trans activists are doing to resist that.
War and Marriage
This week a new article by me and Craig Willse went up on Organizing Upgrade that aims to capture some of the important left critiques of marriage that have been obscured by the pro-marriage messages of same-sex marriage advocacy.
Also, this interview about why the new campaign for military inclusion for trans people won’t benefit our movements went up on BuzzFeed. As the President pushes us toward war in Syria, its especially important to build shared analysis about anti-war politics. Military service inclusion campaigns invite us to be the new poster children of a purportedly fair and equal military, meanwhile the brutal violence of US militarism continues around the globe. I am hoping both these pieces will stimulate conversation and be useful among activists and in classrooms.
Radio, Buzz and Stopping Jail from Being Built!
KPFA did some great programming around Pride this year focusing on critical queer and trans political resistance and critiques of same-sex marriage, gay military service and other hallmarks of wealthy white gay politics. Here is a whole day of programs that aired on Pride Sunday. Here is a show focusing on the critique of same-sex marriage advocacy, including Kenyon Farrow, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and me. In other news, Buzzfeed published a list of 24 Americans Who Changed the Way We Think About Transgender Rights. I’m excited to be on any list with Sylvia, Marsha, Miss Major, Lou and all these other amazing people.
Finally, I am so excited by all the inspiring work being done by Washington Incarceration Stops Here. We are doing an awesome postcard campaign about what people think our county really needs rather than a new youth jail and family court buildings. And we’re building a coalition of groups who have signed on to our Points of Unity. If your organization wants to sign on, no matter where you are, please let us know! We’re also starting a zine so please let us know if you have art or writing you’d like to contribute or if you can help spread the word to people who may want to contribute, especially youth and people impacted by criminalization and child welfare systems.
Under the Cover of Gay Rights
I wrote “Under the Cover of Gay Rights,” published in N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change in 2013. You can read it here.
Interview: Four Burning Questions for Dean Spade
New article about pinkwashing and new interview in Upping the Anti
Big thanks to Robert Nichols for interviewing me for the journal, Upping the Anti. You can read the interview here. Also, the N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change just published a symposium issue about the Perry v. Brown same-sex marriage litigation. I have an article in it about pinkwashing. I also recommend you check out articles by Andrea Ritchie, Gabriel Arkles, and many more.
Blog Post for Upcoming Conference
This coming Friday and Saturday I’m heading to Los Angeles for a conference that marks the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and the 10th anniversary of Lawrence v. Texas. In advance of the conference, speakers were asked to write blog posts related to the themes of the conference panels we are participating in. These were posted to the Balkinization blog. I thought I’d re-post what I wrote here as well:
Sexual freedom, legal equality and settler colonialism
In recent weeks, the world has been captivated by the emergence of the Idle No More movement. Indigenous people and their allies in Canada and around the world have been engaging in a wave of protest actions. These protests, which include marches, vigils, road blocks, railway blocks, flashmobs and the prominent hunger strike of Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat, are raising a number of significant issues. Initially, the movement was a response to the Harper government’s introduction of Bill C-45, legislation that would significantly weaken environmental protection laws in Canada. As the movement has grown, its message has broadened to raise questions about indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection more generally, both in Canada and around the world where indigenous people struggle against colonization and environmental degradation.
Movements against colonization raise significant questions for scholars studying the legal regulation of sexuality and family. The imposition of gender norms and family formation norms and the use of sexual violence as a tool of war have been significant to processes of colonization. The depiction of cultures and peoples targeted for colonization as “backward” in terms of sexuality and family formation has been a rationalization for colonization, and has often included portraying indigenous women as needing to be saved by the colonizers from their own families and cultures. These methods and rationalizations are visible in the history of the colonization of North America where the Idle No More movement has been most visible so far, but we can also hear these rationales deployed to justify the war in Afghanistan, proposed war with Iran, and in rationales for Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine.
These dynamics are particularly interesting in the context of a contemporary gay and lesbian rights framework in the US and its global influence. As many scholars have noted, the gay and lesbian rights framework has increasingly moved toward demands for formal legal equality in recent decades, particularly focusing on demands for military participation and access to legal marriage. There has been a great deal of critique of these demands by a range of feminist, anti-racist, queer and trans scholars. One aspect of this critique that is particularly interesting in the context of the Idle No More movement’s growing momentum is how these demands speak or fail to speak to the quest for sexual freedom for those imagining freedom from an anti-colonial perspective.
Ostensibly, the contemporary gay and lesbian rights agenda developed from the sexual liberation movements of the 1960’s and ‘70’s that are remembered in images from the Stonewall Riots where queer and trans people fought back against police harassment and criminalization. As it developed, its vision of “freedom” has become more aligned with joining the apparatuses of colonial occupation than fighting them. The US military literally operationalizes US colonial and imperial violence, and marriage enforces the family formation norms for the settler colonial state by disbursing essential benefits to the population based on whether we conform to that norm. As the Idle No More movement and other anti-colonial movements such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement continue to grow, queer and trans politics faces interesting questions about how various approaches to conceptualizing sexual freedom relate to anti-colonial agendas that seek to dismantle the apparatuses in which certain lesbian and gay rights campaigns and court cases seek gay and lesbian inclusion. These questions are particularly interesting now, as gay and lesbian people are increasingly articulated as those that need saving in colonial discourses. Access to legal marriage and military participation for gays and lesbians are now often used as measuring sticks for whether or not a country respects human rights, and human rights enforcement rationalizations are a popular justification for military intervention. The Idle No More movement’s emergence in this moment provides an opportunity for reflection on the relationship between commitments to sexual freedom and commitments to self-determination and decolonization.