Throughout the history of activism within the LGBT+ community, there has been a common goal to promote openness and acceptance. By employing a strategy modeled after the civil rights movement, which mainly focused on assimilation into the dominant institutions as a means of acceptance, activist groups have received their fair share of criticism. In 1997, Cathy J Cohen, a Black lesbian author and social activist, published the groundbreaking article “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” a year after a controversy she introduces in the beginning of the essay. The famed Gay Men’s Health Crisis, best known for their active role in the treatment of HIV/AIDS during the AIDS crisis, came under fire after
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A Queer Dilemma,” which states that queer activism chooses to destabilize a collective identity and community rather than adopt a stable collective which are necessary for action. He raises the question “When and how are stable collective identities necessary for social action and social change?” (Gamson 403). This gets to the heart of Cohen’s argument, which is that queer activism and politics hinders their ability to radically change these institutions they fight so hard against due to their resistance against the idea that heterosexuality is normal. While the idea of destabilizing and resisting the institutions which promote heterosexuality as the baseline for identity is good in theory, the tactics employed by activist groups mainly focus on “othering” themselves as act of protest, which furthers the binary they want to fight against. In turn, Cohen highlights the harmful nature of this approach for those that are marginalized within these communities, for the focuses of these queer activist groups forget the importance of intersectionality through these …show more content…
The biggest setback in the sphere of queer politics is their inability to recognize and incorporate the roles of class, race, and gender within people’s relations to power, focusing instead on implementing a broad shared experience and an “us versus them” mentality, when in fact, even within these marginalized groups are structures of power and hierarchies which commonly go unrecognized. Rather than taking a reductive view of what is “queer” and “straight”, activists must organize around an intersectional approach which can help identify allies and where to find them. Instead of rooting these efforts in a similar history of oppression, queer politics must be rooted in the shared relationship to the dominant power structures which establish privilege. It is through the reevaluation of the priorities within activist groups, opening dialogue and focusing on shared relationships as oppressed people, recognizing the intersections of various characteristics with power structures, and identifying oppression and privilege within individual lives all across the spectrum of identity that queer activism can progress and truly begin to dismantle these
A Queer Dilemma,” which states that queer activism chooses to destabilize a collective identity and community rather than adopt a stable collective which are necessary for action. He raises the question “When and how are stable collective identities necessary for social action and social change?” (Gamson 403). This gets to the heart of Cohen’s argument, which is that queer activism and politics hinders their ability to radically change these institutions they fight so hard against due to their resistance against the idea that heterosexuality is normal. While the idea of destabilizing and resisting the institutions which promote heterosexuality as the baseline for identity is good in theory, the tactics employed by activist groups mainly focus on “othering” themselves as act of protest, which furthers the binary they want to fight against. In turn, Cohen highlights the harmful nature of this approach for those that are marginalized within these communities, for the focuses of these queer activist groups forget the importance of intersectionality through these …show more content…
The biggest setback in the sphere of queer politics is their inability to recognize and incorporate the roles of class, race, and gender within people’s relations to power, focusing instead on implementing a broad shared experience and an “us versus them” mentality, when in fact, even within these marginalized groups are structures of power and hierarchies which commonly go unrecognized. Rather than taking a reductive view of what is “queer” and “straight”, activists must organize around an intersectional approach which can help identify allies and where to find them. Instead of rooting these efforts in a similar history of oppression, queer politics must be rooted in the shared relationship to the dominant power structures which establish privilege. It is through the reevaluation of the priorities within activist groups, opening dialogue and focusing on shared relationships as oppressed people, recognizing the intersections of various characteristics with power structures, and identifying oppression and privilege within individual lives all across the spectrum of identity that queer activism can progress and truly begin to dismantle these