Sexuality, Subjectivity, and LGBT Militancy in the United States: Paper at the workshop of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences: “Players and Arenas: The Interactive Dynamics of Protest,” Wassenaar, Netherlands (April 15, 2015)

This paper presents a book manuscript in which I examine the fluctuating place of sexuality in LGBT mobilization in the US. The book, forthcoming at Amsterdam University Press (2019), contends that, while politically successful, the US LGBT movement has a record of neglecting a key aspect of LGBT militancy—sexuality—and analyses grassroots efforts at re-politicizing sexuality and re-sexualizing LGBT politics. As LGBT movements in Western Europe and North America are becoming increasingly successful at awarding LGBT people rights, especially institutional recognition for same-sex couples and their families, what becomes of the deeper social transformation that these movements initially aimed to achieve? The United States is in many ways a paradigmatic model for LGBT movements in other countries. My book manuscript focuses on the transformations of the United States’ LGBT movement since the 1980s, highlighting the relationship between its institutionalization and the disappearance of sexuality from its most visible claims, so that its growing visibility and legitimation since the 1990s have not led to an increase in militancy. The book examines the issue from the bottom up, identifying the links between the varying importance of sexuality as a movement theme and actors’ mobilization, and enhances the import of subjectivity in militancy. It draws attention to cultural, sometimes infrapolitical, forms of militancy that perpetuate the role of sexuality in LGBT militancy