458 - Thematic Session. Sexuality and Social Change

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

Critics of neoliberalism have argued that the early years of the 21st century have been marked by largely symbolic victories for various social justice movements. Rather than transform the structures of social inequality, social movement politics and discourses have been coopted by conservative institutions that reconstitute equality and justice in the image of corporations and the global power elite. Tolerance, inclusion, and assimilation have displaced the approaches to radical social change advocated by various identity-based social movements, including critical race and ethnic, feminist, workers’ rights, disability, and LGBTQIA* activists. This panel explores the capacities of contemporary social movements to intervene in and disrupt the neoliberal policies and practices that engender, sustain, and exacerbate social inequality. The panel will foreground forms of marginalization and domination that are organized by/through sexuality and other intersecting forms of oppression. Accordingly, the panelists will explore the contradictory and shifting landscape of sexual, gender, racial, class, and national politics characterized by the uptake of homonormative subjectivities into the upper echelons of power structures in the U.S. and worldwide, as well as potential strategies for resistance that might produce meaningful social change in the cultural, institutional, historical, and spatial terrain of global sexual worlds.

Sub Unit

• Thematic Sessions

Session Organizers

• Patrick Ryan Grzanka, University of Tennessee

• Emily S. Mann, University of South Carolina

Presider

• Tom J. Waidzunas, Temple University

Panelists

• Amin Ghaziani, University of British Columbia

• Jyoti Puri, Simmons College

• Jessica Fields, San Francisco State University

• Georgiann Davis, University of Nevada-Las Vegas

Discussant

• Tom J. Waidzunas, Temple University