QUEER THEN AND NOW
The David R. Kessler Lectures 2002-2020
Edited by Debanuj Dasgupta, Joseph L. V. Donica, and Margot Weiss
Feminist Press. 391 pages, $28.95
THIS LATEST COMPILATION from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (clags), one of the LGBTQ community’s most august academic bodies, presents seventeen lectures by the organization’s annual recipients of the David R. Kessler Award, a prestigious honor bestowed on a person whose work has significantly contributed to the field of LGBT studies. Authors’ contemporary reflections on their original speeches combine retrospection with observations from our own times. This exciting feature enhances the timeliness of the book. A sense of ongoing conversation is fostered also by two roundtables conducted in Spring 2021, in which several Kessler awardees discuss the histories and current thinking on topics of queer and trans activism and scholarship.
One signal accomplishment of this important anthology is its “dynamic interface between the street and the classroom.” Although occasionally lectures become mired in theory, the general approach of the analyses is aimed at exposing the ongoing failure of the neoliberal projects of assimilation and normalization as they operate in LGBT social action and thought. Summing up the worlds of queer theory and scholarship “then” and “now,” the editors observe that: “Changes in the art world, in transnational political organizing and feminist critique, in practices of archiving and making history have made possible new queer and trans worlds. And yet, white supremacy, virulent homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and racism as well as the rise of new authoritarian movements around the globe continue to threaten queer and trans communities.” Contributions in history, art, activism, and scholarship commingle in these pages. Activist Gayle Rubin decries the widespread assumption that LGBT studies only began in the 1990s; the late artist Douglas Crimp provides a cogent account of the birth of performance art in the fusion of the “gay scene” and the “art scene” in 1970s New York City; poet Cheryl Clark traces her early literary influence to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s before concluding with a powerful excerpt from a short story by contemporary writer Mecca Jamillah Sullivan. Some solutions are proposed. Scholar Cathy J. Cohen points up the distinction between performative and substantive solidarity at the outset of her trenchant assessment of the need for structural realignment so that “transformational work can begin.” Scholar Roderick A. Ferguson looks at Street Tranvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.), a Stonewall-era organization founded by pioneers Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, as an example of “strange affinities and as the impetus to recast intersectionality” in a way that links Marx, the Frankfurt School and the struggle for transgender liberation. These glimpses provide just a small hint of the provocations and inspiration that await the reader of this rich collection.
