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Becoming Coalitional: The Strange Alliance Between Queer to the Left and the Jesus People, USA

Sun, August 17, 12:30 to 1:30pm, TBA

Abstract

This paper explores a low-cost housing coalition that formed in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood in the late 1990s and included a group of queer leftists, Queer to the Left, and an evangelical Christian group that feeds homeless people and also opposes homosexuality, the Jesus People USA. Strikingly, difference here was both pronounced and a non-event: the two groups never confronted each other about homosexuality. I use this case of affinities across chasms of perceived difference to explore what a coalition can do—what desires, capacities, and potentialities a coalition might generate and nourish. Through participant observation in the coalition and interviews with members of both groups, I investigate what drew them together, what this “touching” across difference tasted like and made possible, and what their convergence without unity tells us about political appetite and the not-yet of politics. I argue that what drove this seemingly unimaginable alliance were political desires that counter the supposition that coalitions are mainly tactical, pragmatic affairs. Interviewees describe wanting to be “in something” with others; hopes generated through surprising encounters; a longing to live belonging differently, through politics and “doing together” rather than only through identity; the thrill of defying forces that divide and conquer; and desire for activism that holds out the possibility of being changed.

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