The Impossibility of Liberation: Queer Political Thought Since the New Left

• In Event: Queer Interrogations: State Sovereignty, Precarity, and Reproductive Rights

Abstract

Though often championed by scholars and activists seeking an alternative to an institutionally-integrated and corporatized LGBTQ politics, the legacy of gay liberation and its associated New Left appendages and splinter groups has come to present an impasse rather than a path forward for a queer class politics. This inherited perspective features numerous interpretative and tactical shortcomings concerning visions of the transformative potential of sexuality and gender and organizational approaches to questions of constituency and coalition. This paper constructs a genealogy of these ideas extending from gay liberationist, radical lesbian, and related activist orientations and their readings of Herbert Marcuse, Shulamith Firestone, and related theorists of liberation. In doing so, it notes where and how a critique of capitalism became conflated with theories of sexism and how class came to describe a position of marginality or some experience of particularized oppression rather than a relation of production. Along the way it notes where skeptics—such as some of those thinkers in the London-based Gay Left Collective—condemned prevailing liberationist tendencies for warping left-wing theory and practice. The paper too assesses significant developments within this theoretical orientation in the half century since the formative riots at Stonewall. It tracks the move from Marcuse’s argument in Eros and Civilization, which began with the problem of abundance and the welfare state, to those like queer theorist Matt Brim and others who place precarity and poverty at the foundation of their analyses. The conclusion contains the beginning of a more comprehensive assessment and critique of queer resistance politics in its current political form, noting where sectarian, anarchist, and non-profit organizations alike converge in their renderings of queer liberation and that notion’s purported ability to invigorate an anti-capitalist politics.

Author

• Joanna W. Wuest, Princeton University