Innovation at the Intersection: Locating Oppression and Resistance among African-American LGBT Organizers

• In Event: 421 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Paper Session. Social Movements and their Sexual Tensions

Abstract

Employing in-depth, semi-structured interviews with community-based organizers at different levels of leadership across a range of organizations in New York City, textual analysis, and social networking mapping and analysis, this study examines the paradoxical positioning of African-American LGBT and queer-identified organizers working at the intersection of several foci of struggle. Two questions have emerged from early observations that find these organizers to be simultaneously successful and disadvantaged in their capacity to create social change. First, what are the processes that link a social movement actor’s identity or identities to issue orientations and action? Secondly, what is the relationship between an actor’s position within multiple intersecting systems of domination and their capacity for social action in order to change these systems? This paper elaborates two processes that might explain the paradox I observe: intersecting oppression and intersecting resistance.  These two processes—analytically separable but closely interrelated—might operate separately or in tandem and can interact with one another in various ways.

Author

• Terrell D. Frazier, Columbia University