Queer Worldmaking: Radical Sexual Politics in the Age of United States Hegemony
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PhD Thesis
Embargoed until: 2024-09-01
Reason: Author request
Embargoed until: 2024-09-01
Reason: Author request
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Queer struggles have radically contested the global social relations of the post-war American order. These struggles include most prominently the gay liberation movement of the sixties, the black lesbian feminist movement of the seventies, and the AIDS activist movement of the eighties. They responded to the successive regimes of accumulation that determined the organization and expansion of the American world system, forming extensive organizational structures, solidarity networks, and critical knowledges that traveled across the boundaries of nation, state, and territory. They were not intended primarily, or often even at all, as parodic citations of dominant gender norms within the public sphere, but rather as antagonistic practices that could transform and transcend the social relations of United States hegemony. This thesis is therefore about queer worldmaking in its most literal sense. It finds a connection between queer political formations and the American world system. The transnational connections, encounters, and ideological orientations of these queer social movements have been omitted within their nation-based narrative histories. This study asks the question: What appears when a reading of radical queer movements is pursued that resists an investment in nationally bounded chronologies? A transnational history of radical sexual politics is mobilized in the service of an alternative theory of queerness, revolutionary politics, and pleasure. It illuminates how queer social movements have deployed pleasure to validate their cause of revolutionary transformation on a transnational scale. Projects of queer worldmaking articulate queerness not only as a product of subordination and repression, but also as the site of pleasure, enjoyment, and sociality. What unites these social movements, it is argued, is their conviction that the pursuit of Eros could create openings for the supersession of the existing global order and the instantiation of egalitarian systems through which we can collectively and cooperatively determine our gender and sexual lives.
Authors
Stoffel, ACollections
- Theses [4121]