If We Were Kin : Race, Identification, and Intimate Political Appeals

Lisa Beard

ISBN 10: 0197517323 / ISBN 13: 9780197517321

Editore: Oxford University Press Mär 2023, 2023

Riguardo questo articolo

Neuware - Drawing on the political provocations of James Baldwin, Sylvia Rivera, Lorraine Hansberry, and grassroots LGBTQ activists, If We Were Kin is about the we of politics--how that we is made, fought over, and remade--and how these struggles lie at the very core of questions about power and political change. Lisa Beard traces a distinct lineage of political appeals from within race and gender justice movements--claims to a we which invoke themes of intimacy and advance powerful visions of political relationships rooted in mutuality and shared freedom.

Codice articolo 9780197517321

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: If We Were Kin : Race, Identification, and Intimate Political Appeals
• Editore: Oxford University Press Mär 2023
• Data di pubblicazione: 2023
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0197517323
• ISBN 13: 9780197517321
• Rilegatura: Taschenbuch
• Condizione: Neu
• Dimensioni: 236 L x 157 A x 14 P (millimetri) 236 millimetri di larghezza per 157 millimetri di altezza per 14 millimetri di profondità
• Peso: 349 grammi

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

In June 1973, amid ideological rifts in the U.S. gay liberation movement, thousands of people gathered in New York City's Washington Square Park to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. Partway through the rally, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) co-founder Sylvia Rivera fought her way to the stage to address the predominantly white, middle class lesbian and gay crowd. Over the din of their boos and jeers, Rivera reprimanded the crowd for failing in their responsibilities to their "gay brothers and sisters" in jail, detailed the sacrifices she had made for the movement, and called them into the politics of STAR, "The people who are trying to do something for all of us and not men and women that belong to a white middle class white club! And that is what you all belong to!" Rivera's appeal thus worked through a push-pull of distance and belonging, shaming the movement for its assimilatory turn while invoking forms of kinship and calling her listeners into an expansive multi-issue liberation politics.

How does a sense of intimacy call people into political community? If We Were Kin is about the we of politics--how that we is made, fought over, and remade--and how these struggles lie at the very core of questions about power and political change. Across a range of sites in racial justice and queer/trans liberation movements--from speeches by James Baldwin and Sylvia Rivera in the 1960s and 1970s to contemporary immigrant justice campaigns by the antiracist LGBTQ organization Southerners on New Ground (SONG)--Lisa Beard traces a distinct lineage of appeals that challenge atomized and hierarchical racial formations in the United States and advance powerful visions of political relationships rooted in mutuality and shared freedom. In plumbing the deeper registers of identificatory appeals, Beard transforms understandings of identity, solidarity, political confrontation, and apparent loss/failure as points of possibility. If We Were Kin offers an innovative account of racial politics and political theory rooted in Black, Latinx, queer, and trans activism in twentieth and twenty-first century America.

Informazioni sull?autore

Lisa Beard is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Western Washington University. Beard's work has been published in Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, National Political Science Review (now National Review of Black Politics), and in the edited volume A Political Companion to James Baldwin.