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Kate Bedford,
"Introduction"
(page 4 of 5)
Movements
In Part 3 we turn to movement
interventions, looking at what can be learned from existing projects
that seek to put sexual and economic justice into practice. To use Ara
Wilson's framing, this section understands political events and
movements as sites of social relations, involving social as well as
conceptual workÑconcrete ties to others, work to create space, and "the
labor of sustaining ties that make up an interpretive community crucial
for political praxis." The pieces featured here foreground that labor in
a variety of sites. In so doing, they take forward two of the debates
highlighted earlier. First, they mark the work of social cooperation
explicitly, and identify the differential value placed upon it as a
result of hierarchies of gender and race. Second, they examine both
movements that appear outside of formal sites of labor exploitation
while also dealing with mobilization in workplaces and other zones of
life marked as economic. This means that the pieces are well positioned
to consider the interrelation between the contested inside/outside of
movements dealing with sexual or economic injustice. For example,
Wilson's quip that the new formulations of activism evident in the World
Social Forum "[are] not your grandfather's left" segues nicely into
Franzway and Fonow's analysis of the "old left" union movement and its
reinvigoration by feminist and queer activism, while Svati P. Shah and
Mandisa Mbali consider the potential that activism around economic
concerns may hold for those seeking greater sexual justice.
Ara Wilson looks at the World Social Forum, launched as a protest
against capitalist globalization in 2001 and a site where sexual and
economic justice already coexist as political projects. She examines how
sex and economics have concretely, but unevenly and incompletely,
"co-mingled" at the forum, asking what work sexuality does and what its
inclusion suggests about where sexual justice meets economic justice.
How is sexuality relevant to radical economic projects? How does work
for sexual justice attend to global economic inequalities? She argues
that inclusion of sexuality, as diversity, helps symbolically
differentiate the World Social Forum not only from the hierarchies and
exclusions associated with neoliberalism, but also from previous left
movements, in that it signals an emphasis on open space, participatory
democracy, difference, and inclusion. However, "sexuality becomes
scarce" when the forum is seen as a platform for organizing global
action.
Like Jon Binnie, Wilson foregrounds questions of scale in her
analysis, arguing that sexual rights advocates have largely approached
the transnational scale as a tactic to change national level policies
and domestic climates, rather than devising a specific political agenda
regarding transnationality and sexuality. The World Social Forum offers
the potential for something else—for having sexuality be more central to
a platform for organizing global action toward achieving alternative
futures. But the encounter it stages between sexual and economic
movements is influenced by the specific histories and geographies of
each, particularly by the fact that sexual rights movements have been
participating for decades in a professionalized rights-based U.N.-NGO
arena that economic justice advocates often regard with suspicion. Hence
she notes the concern that liberal formulations of sexual autonomy and
reproductive rights may limit the ability of sexual rights advocacy to
address broader social justice issues, especially those involving a
critique of global capital. However, Wilson also explores "how the
liberal political epistemology of sexual rights is conditioned by
political geography and social practices." Rather than focus on the
conceptual logic underpinning these movements, then, she insists on the
value of tracing the connections or failures of articulation among
sexual and economic movements to specific political histories and
institutional contexts (which in turn influence the conceptual logics
utilized by advocates).
The possibilities for inter-movement learning and collaboration are
also central to "Queer Activism, Feminism, and the Transnational Labor
Movement," wherein Suzanne Franzway and Mary Margaret Fonow examine
unions as key sites of transnational activism for some sexuality
activists. Drawing on their past work examining the constraints and
opportunities that globalization presents to union feminists who are
building new political alliances between women's movements and organized
labor, Franzway and Fonow explore how LGBT activists are using the
resources, networks, and discourses of the transnational labor movement
to mobilize for rights, and how, in the process, they are helping to
revitalize unions at the national and transnational level. They chart
the importance of self-organizing spaces for queer union activism, but
they also highlight the value of alliances with other movements, both
within the labor movement (such as with union feminism) and outside it
(such as in union support for Sydney's annual Mardi Gras festival), both
with national actors and through international solidarities. In this
regard, and echoing a theme that was central to the Barnard Center for
Research on Women colloquium more generally, the authors emphasize the
important role played by the discursive framing of issues. In order that
unions are seen as potential mobilizing structures for achieving
economic justice for LGBT members, queer labor activists are struggling
to frame concerns in ways that resonate across a range of domains, such
as work, family, intimate spheres, sexuality, self-care, and so on. In
particular, Franzway and Fonow critically interrogate the trope of
"working families" used by some organizations in an attempt to tap in to
concerns about gender equality and intimacy, suggesting that it is
ultimately a limited frame for queer or feminist union activism. They
argue that critique of heteronormative social relations has more
potential to revitalize the labor movement, since it promises to expand
the movement's boundaries, and push unions to consider new forms of
organizing, new types of workers, and different types of issues.
Svati P. Shah examines the intersections and impasses between the
politics of sexuality and the politics of the left in the contemporary
U.S. context. Attentive to the rich, diverse, and heterogeneous nature
of both left and sexuality movements, Shah argues there are nonetheless
some key commonalities in how they frame core issues which present
stumbling blocks to better inter-movement organizing. Although concerns
with power, domination, and uneven distribution motivate left movements
when confronting what are seen to be issues of class and political
economy, these movements endorse liberal positions on sexuality that
often turn to the state for redress and protection. As she said at the
colloquium, "When we are talking about economic justice, we are critical
of the state. When we are talking about normativity or 'protecting the
innocent victims of trafficking,' then we are appealing to the state,
and very often it's the same people doing both of these things." Left
movements have also supported work to redress discrimination against
non-normative people through a liberal politics of representation and
inclusion, rather than through a framework of labor and power, and they
have generally failed to critically interrogate their investments in
sexual normativity, their valuing of working families, or their failure
to mark or recognize sexuality except in reference to gayness.
Conversely, the mainstream U.S. LGBT movement has eschewed a
class-centered framework, and mobilized to expand individual freedoms in
a deeply stratified society. Queer critiques of the pro-marriage
movement on the grounds of class and race exist, but they remain at the
margins of sexuality activism. Shah notes routes forward, such as the
alliance against the criminalization of sexuality forged between sex
workers and queer activists at the 2004 World Social Forum in India, but
she concludes that these will remain marginal without an expanded left
framework for understanding sexuality.
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