Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Margot Weiss talked with Ryan Conrad, Yasmin Nair, and Karma Chávez, three members of Against Equality, a queer online archive, publishing, and arts collective that challenges the political vision of mainstream gay and lesbian politics—especially inclusion in marriage, the U.S. military, and the prison industrial complex via hate crimes legislation. They have three anthologies: Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage, Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars, and Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You.

This American Quarterly forum builds on a symposium held in 2011 at Wesleyan University on the relationship between academia and activsm. Our symposium was inspired by a pair of concerns: that academics too often either romanticize activism as the site where “real” political work happens or else ascribe an abstracted radical politics to quotidian academic work.

Margot Weiss talked to Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore about the academic appropriation of activist intellectual labor and the hierarchies of intellectual work inside and outside the university. Sycamore is a writer, editor of several books including That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull, 2004, 2008), Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Seal, 2007), and Why Are Faggots so Afraid of Faggots? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (AK Press, 2012), queer activist, artist, filmmaker, and critic.

Blog post that reflects on the current impasse in the debate between sex-positive and sex-negative, or pro-BDSM and anti-BDSM, feminism. This debate is due for an overhaul--I hope that recasting it might clear a path toward a more productive discussion about the feminist politics of desire.