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Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations

  • In this book, the terms “queer” and “LGBT” are used interchangeably.
  • Mainstream approaches diversity by closing the gap of race and gender, but they do really little for global capitalism and the longstanding socioeconomic inequalities.
  • Virtual Equality: The Mainstream of the gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement.
  • Why are antigay violence, blatant homophobia, and living in the closet still a problem after 50 years of lesbian and gay activism?
  • Leaders of gay and lesbian movement made political compromises in order to achieve “virtual” equality, while the rest of the community suffer.
  • Author argued that not all queer activist wanted what has been stated above.
  • Queer activists wanted the leaders of gay and lesbian movement to organize a national group that is diverse.

Cont'd.

Quotes

Still Ain't Satisfied: Equality and the Limits of LGBT Politics

“Queer projects become culturally and ideologically dependent upon corporation..."

“Queer activists use diversity rhetoric to compete with nonprofit groups to garner corporate funding and mainstream legitimacy, enhance their public reputation or moral standing, establish their diversity-related competence or expertise, and accrue 'liberal capital.'"

“Those who do not respect diversity are the new villains in the morality tale of equality and difference in the United States.”

  • Others have argued that the gay and lesbian movement - and the gay identity itself - has always been strongly tied to market forces.
  • Gays and lesbians were eager to be recognized as full participants in U.S. policial and consumer culture, which is why they are responding positively to the markets.
  • It is important to note that during this time, most (I think all) of the leaders for the gay and lesbian movement are white, middle class people.
  • This is not a reflection of the whole population of people that identities with being gay or lesbian.
  • States that although the LGBT movement has come a long way since the 1980s (she lists all of the accomplishments), once LGBT people were given the right to marriage, it is like they stopped fighting for anything else and for anyone else.
  • Equality in the LGBT community has mainly benefited white people, and that many LGBT Organizations ignore this fact.
  • Vaid gives a outline of what must be done with new LGBT movements.

Three ways that the new movement would differ:

1. Differ in Policy and Political Objectives

2. Differ in organizational forms and operations

3. Differ in Political Operations

Important Quotes/Statistics

  • "It is the choice to challenge the status quo at its deepest roots that will protect LGBT people the most."
  • "We become the niche, happily marketed to by corporations that get a free pass on all sorts of horrible practices because of their (paltry) support for LGBT organizations."
  • "There is a racial and gender assumption within the mainstream LGBT movement that needs to be acknowledged."
  • "The current LGBT mainstream, in effect, asks no more than the right to be equal to the average straight person trapped within a structurally unfair, racist, and heterosexist system.
  • "Within the LGB population, several groups are much more likely to be poor than others. African American people in same-sex couples and same-sex couples who live in rural areas are much more likely to be poor than are white or urban same-sex couples.
  • About 17% of female same-sex couples and 11% of male same-sex couples had income more than 200% below the poverty line.
  • "However, some data have shown that attitudes of young African Americans are not as positive towards LGBT people as the attitudes of their white or Latino counterparts."

Overview of Most Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma

  • Collective identity plays a role in the gay and lesbian movement; in the past, people assumed that collective identity was already established.
  • Collective identity is not only from within (our individual ones) but is also influenced by what we are surrounded with (laws, institutions, and resources)
  • Inclusion of transgender and bisexual people in lesbian and gay politics
  • Bisexuals and transgender are challenging the politics of gay and lesbian movement.
  • Sexual and gender identities are not solid; they can change.
  • Logical answer is crucial in lesbian and gay politics.
  • Queerness: boundary disruption and category deconstruction
  • Assimilation: from being different to normal.
  • Acting “normal” to fit in with society and be accepted by them.
  • Queer is a shift in the boundaries of tribal membership, with no shift in power.
  • Everyone is equal, but it depends on one’s identity?

Questions:

Split up into groups and discuss.

“Queer politics, although given organized body in the activist group Queer Nation, operates largely through the decentralized, local, and often anti-organizational cultural activism of street of street postering, parodic and nonconformist self-presentation, and underground alternative magazines; it has defined itself largely against conventional lesbian and gay politics.”

“It is socially produced binaries (gay/straight, man/woman) that are the basis of oppression; fluid, unstable experiences of self become fixed primarily in the service of social control. Distruptin those categories, refusing rather than embracing ethnic minority status, is the key to liberation.”

1. What do you think of how the first two authors used/defined the word 'Queer' differently?

2. What do you think of Vaid's points of the direction the LGBT Movement should take? Do you agree or disagree?

3. How can we relate these readings to the overall theme of Coloniality in this course?

Relationship:

  • People of color are still put on the back burner and not treated with equality
  • Black Trans Women specifically are outcast and brutally harassed, sometimes even murdered.
  • The 'othering' of LGBT people.
  • LGBT movement is sometimes compared to the Civil Rights movement, according to the readings we did this week.
  • LGBT people are more likely to live in poverty, especially African Americans.

LGBT Movement in the U.S.

Rose Howley & Jordan Lor

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