This issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, edited by Brenna Munro and Gema Pérez-Sánchez, offers timely and critical interventions for theorizing and engaging with queer activism both across national boundaries and between the “Global North” and “Global South,” a chasm they seek to complicate. Troubling the notion of the Global North as the site of progressive politics, contributors to this issue point to the long and important histories of exchange and coalition across this divide as well as the deeply worrying political moment in the United States and much of Europe during which the rights and safety of racial and sexual minorities are under attack.
Calling our attention to localized histories and strategies, the pieces in this issue point to an alternative framing of both space and time—challenging a narrative that privileges the present moment and centers the Global North as the site of forward political movement. Rather, we are presented here with nuanced and particular engagements with histories of activism that upend assumptions about progress and coalition. On this latter point, Deborah Gould’s contribution to this volume details the strategic partnership between members of Queer to the Left and Jesus People USA around the fight for low-cost housing in 1990’s Chicago. In their Introduction, Munro and Pérez-Sánchez write, “The question of working with others across differences, of forging alliances—however contingent and fragile—permeates the contributions in this special issue on Thinking Queer Activism Transnationally.” Taken together, the unexpected coalitions, such as the strategic partnership examined by Gould, work to round out our notion of what is—and what has long been—both possible and necessary.
