Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

This essay begins to explore and articulate the concept of queer precarity. Queer precarity emphasizes the particular vulnerabilities of LGBT, queer, and GNC (gender non-conforming) people to the current economic transformations. Contrary to the myth of gay affluence, research from at least the mid-1990s shows that queer and gender non-conforming people are more vulnerable to poverty than their straight and cisgendered male or female counterparts. Yet this myth is sustained by the mainstream LGBT movement and too often shared by the progressive and activist labor movement. It is a particularly destructive myth for labor organizers because LGBT/Q people make up …

BDSM is the consensual exchange of power for pleasure. BDSM is an acronym made up of three term-sets: bondage and discipline (B&D), domination and submission (D/s), and sadomasochism (SM, S/M, or S&M). Although practices similar to those in contemporary BDSM communities have existed in most places and times, BDSM communities are a phenomenon of industrialized capitalist societies.

This essay explores the political dreams we invest in radical sexualities and why we might want to find liberation, specifically economic justice, in radical sexualities. In a time of ongoing neoliberalization of knowledge, where what might appear to be radical sexual difference is all too easily absorbed into multicultural tolerance, I argue that the desire for sex to be liberatory indexes a more social desire for transformation. Taking up the recent turn away from critique in both queer studies and anthropology, I argue that we need critique now more than ever—an immanent critique that implicates both objects and subjects in …

Jaye Cee Whitehead’s book The Nuptial Deal is a sociological study of a marriage equality organization (given the pseudonym Marriage Rights Now, or MRN) in the western United States

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.

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.

This essay contrasts two contemporary activist groups: Gay Shame San Francisco, which seeks to disrupt homonormative lesbian and gay activism by challenging policing and gentrification; and the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, which disseminates a public image of BDSM, leather, and kinky practitioners as suburban minivan drivers who “look and dress like your neighbors.” Margot Weiss argues that neoliberalism’s relegation of sexuality into the realm of the private renders even kinky sexual practices like BDSM normative—kink-normative, if not homonormative—by detaching potentially disruptive sexual practices from any form of radical or progressive—public—politics.