Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T10:41:17.489Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Trumpism, Citizenship, and the Future of the LGBTQ Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2018

Zein Murib
Zein Murib*
Affiliation:
Fordham University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Scholarship on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) politics argues that political claims, such as access to the military and marriage, are most effective when representatives from the group articulate that the desire for inclusion and participation in those institutions is similar to the desires held by their straight and nontransgender counterparts. This strategy of assimilation has yielded many positive legal changes. And yet the Donald Trump administration marks a period in which these gains have been repeatedly challenged and particular segments of the LGBTQ group are increasingly under attack. This article offers a preliminary analysis of how LGBTQ politics has been impacted by the 2016 election. Using a historical case study of LGBTQ identity construction and agenda development during the second half of the 1990s, I ask: how might the LGBTQ group mine its recent history for clues to rethink its political agenda and political strategies? Having shown that opportunities to advance a different movement—one focused on more radical, broadly inclusive changes—were bypassed during this period, I conclude by putting forward several recommendations for contemporary LGBTQ movement building and resistance strategies.

Keywords

LGBTQ politicsintersectionalityTrumpismhomonationalism
Type
Research Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 649 - 672
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This article was greatly enhanced thanks to feedback from three anonymous Politics & Gender reviewers; Lisa Beard, Marla Brettschneider, Susan Burgess, Diane Detournay, Cricket Keating, and Dara Strolovitch; as well as participants in the 2017 University of Michigan Institute for Research on Women and Gender Conference, “Opposition to the Political Participation of Women and Gender Justice Advocates,” convened by Jennifer Piscopo and Denise Walsh. Archival research for this article was funded by a 2014 Phil Zwickler Memorial Research Grant from Cornell University.

References

REFERENCES

Ayoub, Phillip M. 2014. “With Arms Wide Shut: Threat Perception, Norm Reception, and Mobilized Resistance to LGBT Rights.” Journal of Human Rights 13 (3): 337–62.Google Scholar
Beltrán, Cristina. 2010. The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Benford, Robert D., and Snow, David A.. 2000. “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology 26: 611–39.Google Scholar
Berbrier, Mitch. 2002. “Making Minorities: Cultural Space, Stigma Transformation Frames, and the Categorical Status Claims of Deaf, Gay, and White Supremacist Activists in Late Twentieth Century America.” Sociological Forum 17 (4): 553–91.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren. 2014. “Citizenship.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, eds. Burgett, Bruce and Hendler, Glenn. New York: New York University Press, 37–42.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Mary. 1997. “Celebration and Suppression: The Strategic Uses of Identity by the Lesbian and Gay Movement.” American Journal of Sociology 103 (3): 531–65.Google Scholar
Bessire, Lucas, and Bond, David. 2017. “Introduction: The Rise of Trumpism.” Cultural Anthropology, January 18. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1031-introduction-the-rise-of-trumpism (accessed October 1, 2018).Google Scholar
Brandzel, Amy L. 2016. Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Cho, Sumi, Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, and McCall, Leslie. 2013. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs 38 (4): 785–810.Google Scholar
Cohen, Cathy J. 1997. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (4): 437–65.Google Scholar
Cohen, Cathy J. 1999. The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Connolly, William E. 2002. Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Expanded ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989: 139–67.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99.Google Scholar
Dhamoon, Rita Kaur. 2011. “Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality.” Political Research Quarterly 64 (1): 230–43.Google Scholar
Disch, Lisa. 2012. “The Impurity of Representation and the Vitality of Democracy.” Cultural Studies 26 (2–3): 207–22.Google Scholar
Fetner, Tina. 2008. How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Gamson, Joshua. 1995. “Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma.” Social Problems 42 (3): 390–407.Google Scholar
Gould, Deborah B. 2009. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2007. “Intersectionality as a Normative and Empirical Paradigm.” Politics & Gender 3 (2): 248–53.Google Scholar
Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2013. “Empirical Intersectionality: A Tale of Two Approaches.” University of California Irvine Law Review 312: 259–94.Google Scholar
Lieberman, Robert C., Mettler, Suzanne, Pepinsky, Thomas B., Roberts, Kenneth M., and Vallely, Richard. 2017. “Trumpism and American Democracy: History, Comparison, and the Predicament of Liberal Democracy in the United States.” https://ssrn.com/abstract=3028990 (accessed October 1, 2018).Google Scholar
Murib, Zein. 2015. “Transgender: Examining an Emerging Political Identity Using Three Political Processes.” Politics, Groups and Identities 3(3): 381–97.Google Scholar
Murib, Zein. 2017. “Rethinking GLBT as a Descriptive and Analytic Category in Political Science.” In LGBTQ Politics: A Critical Reader, eds. Brettschneider, Marla, Burgess, Susan, and Keating, Cricket. New York: New York University Press, 14–33.Google Scholar
Norton, Anne. 1988. Reflections on Political Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Rimmerman, Craig. 2015. The Gay and Lesbian Movements: Assimilation or Liberation? Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Simien, Evelyn M. 2007. “Doing Intersectionality Research: From Conceptual Issues to Practical Examples.” Politics & Gender 3 (2): 264–71.Google Scholar
Stone, Amy L. 2012. Gay Rights at the Ballot Box. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Strolovitch, Dara Z. 2007. Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Strolovitch, Dara Z., and Crowder, Chaya Y.. 2018. “Respectability, Anti-Respectability, and Intersectionally Responsible Representation.” PS: Political Science and Politics 51 (2): 340–44.Google Scholar
Tabachnick, David Edward. 2016. “The Four Characteristics of Trumpism.” The Hill, January 5. http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/presidential-campaign/264746-the-four-characteristics-of-trumpism (accessed October 1, 2018).Google Scholar
Valentine, David. 2007. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.Google Scholar
Williams, Melissa S. 1998. Voice, Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth. 2009. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage.Google Scholar