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.
