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Queerness has historically been associated with an array of deviances, perversities, and pathologies that violate the ‘proper’ relations of modern society. It has served as a designation for unsanctioned desires that are linked to a dizzying number of ‘social ills’ including sex work, paedophilia, pornography, drugs, idleness, hedonism, and disease and that threaten to corrode the fabric of a healthy body politic. In the West, queerness has been conventionally figured as antithetical to the Protestant virtues of productivism, frugality, and restraint, as well as to the heteronormative family model and its associated ideals of bourgeois domesticity, whiteness, private property, legitimate reproduction (from procreation to inheritance), and repressive sexual morality. Outside the West, state elites have framed queerness as a symptom of Western consumerism and decadence that undermines ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’ national cultures. Such discourses have facilitated attempts to shore up national sovereignty, harden borders, and repress non-normative sexual formations at home. Most recently, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has characterized LGBT rights as an existential threat to the Russian nation and as precipitating the collapse (i.e., feminization) of Western civilization, thereby indexing queerphobia as a central coordinate of his war rhetoric and geopolitical strategy.
In short, queerness has historically been treated as an irreducibly social problem. Indeed, if state discourses typically proclaim that questions of sexuality belong to the non-political, non-social, private sphere of family life, queerness has been conceived as the intrusion of social pathologies into that sacrosanct private realm. Social movements have challenged the pathologization and criminalization of queerness in divergent ways. On the one hand, numerous mainstream civil rights movements, advocacy networks, and non-governmental organizations have pursued strategies that seek to extend the right of privacy to LGBT+ people. The state, they maintain, has no right to tell individuals, who are simply ‘born this way,’ whom they are allowed to love or marry. This insistence upon the normality and universality of LGBT+ identities denies their social constitution. On the other hand, numerous radical queer movements have rejected this naturalizing move. They have asserted that the organization of all gender and sexual life is continuous with the organization of the wider social order. Rather than a concession, this insight constituted a demand for a fundamental transformation of the social order as a requisite for the achievement of sexual freedom.
My thesis explores three such radical movements: the gay liberation movement of the late sixties, the black lesbian feminism of the seventies, and the AIDS activism of the eighties and nineties. I describe their sexual politics as forms of queer worldmaking. The phrase queer worldmaking seeks to capture various dimenions of these struggles, including that 1) they formed various transnational connections and solidarities, engaged in numerous political activities outside of the United States, and forged an avowedly internationalist orientation and outlook, that 2) they articulated ‘the sexual’ as inseparable from imperialist expansion, global regimes of capital accumulation, processes of border policing and militarization, and other transnational developments, and that 3) they sought not only to negate the existing social order but also elaborated utopian visions of sexual freedom, love, eroticization, and collectivity. The gay liberationists sought to align their fight for sexual liberation with the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles spawning the globe in the sixties; the black lesbian feminists understood Eros as the dissolution of class, racial, and gender differentiations founded on the imperialist social relations of the world system; and the AIDS activists posited promiscuity as a form of resistance to the neoliberal logics of property and privacy. Each movement placed sexual freedom — understood expansively a reconfiguration of social relations towards human flourishing, bodily autonomy, pleasure, and sociality — at the heart of a more egalitarian reordering of our world.