If We Were Kin

Race, Identification, and Intimate Political Appeals

Lisa Beard (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

240 Seiten

2023
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-751733-8 (ISBN)

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In June 1973, amid ideological rifts in the U.S. gay liberation movement, thousands of people gathered in New York City's Washington Square Park to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. Partway through the rally, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) co-founder Sylvia Rivera fought her way to the stage to address the predominantly white, middle class lesbian and gay crowd. Over the din of their boos and jeers, Rivera reprimanded the crowd for failing in their responsibilities to their "gay brothers and sisters" in jail, detailed the sacrifices she had made for the movement, and called them into the politics of STAR, "The people who are trying to do something for all of us and not men and women that belong to a white middle class white club! And that is what you all belong to!" Rivera's appeal thus worked through a push-pull of distance and belonging, shaming the movement for its assimilatory turn while invoking forms of kinship and calling her listeners into an expansive multi-issue liberation politics.

How does a sense of intimacy call people into political community? If We Were Kin is about the we of politics--how that we is made, fought over, and remade--and how these struggles lie at the very core of questions about power and political change. Across a range of sites in racial justice and queer/trans liberation movements--from speeches by James Baldwin and Sylvia Rivera in the 1960s and 1970s to contemporary immigrant justice campaigns by the antiracist LGBTQ organization Southerners on New Ground (SONG)--Lisa Beard traces a distinct lineage of appeals that challenge atomized and hierarchical racial formations in the United States and advance powerful visions of political relationships rooted in mutuality and shared freedom. In plumbing the deeper registers of identificatory appeals, Beard transforms understandings of identity, solidarity, political confrontation, and apparent loss/failure as points of possibility. If We Were Kin offers an innovative account of racial politics and political theory rooted in Black, Latinx, queer, and trans activism in twentieth and twenty-first century America.

Lisa Beard is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Western Washington University. Beard's work has been published in Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, National Political Science Review (now National Review of Black Politics), and in the edited volume A Political Companion to James Baldwin.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Intimate Appeals

Chapter 1: "For Your Gay Brothers and Your Gay Sisters in Jail": Sylvia Rivera's Countercall

Chapter 2: "Flesh of Their Flesh, Bone of Their Bone": James Baldwin's Kinship Politics

Chapter 3: "You Have to Hear What's Being Said to You": Hansberry and Horne's Interruption

Interlude: "My Friends, These People Are Our People": Pat Buchanan's Nostalgic and Demonological Appeals

Chapter 4: "Igniting the Kindred": Southerners On New Ground's Family Values

Conclusion: "Remember That Feeling Because It's the Same Cage": Appeals to Boundness

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	12.05.2023
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	235 x 156 mm
Gewicht	494 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Vergleichende Politikwissenschaften
ISBN-10	0-19-751733-1 / 0197517331
ISBN-13	978-0-19-751733-8 / 9780197517338
Zustand	Neuware