Queer Activism

We're Here! We're Queer? Activist Archives and Archival Activism

by Mathias Danbolt

published in Lambda Nordica, No. 3-4, 2010.

Mutinous Eruptions: Autonomous Spaces of Radical Queer Activism

by Gavin Brown

This paper offers a reflexive ethnography of a set of queer autonomous spaces created in London over the last five... more This paper offers a reflexive ethnography of a set of queer autonomous spaces created in London over the last five years. It traces the political genealogies of a recent strand of radical queer activism that is broadly aligned with the anarchist and anticapitalist wings of the global justice movement. In line with the usage of the term ‘queer’ by these activists themselves, to refer to a variety of states of being that challenge both homonormativity and heteronormativity, this paper utilises a definition of ‘queer’ that moves beyond the ways in which it has been mobilised by many sexual geographers. The ethnography poses questions about the ‘queer’ in ‘queer geography’ and what it means to be an ‘activist’. This work considers the importance (as well as the limits) of these autonomous queer spaces. It suggests that the process of collective experimentation to build autonomous queer spaces is ultimately more transformative and empowering than the resulting structures.

Fat Studies: Mapping the Field

by Charlotte Cooper

Cooper, C. (2010) 'Fat Studies: Mapping The Field', Sociology Compass, 4: 12, 1020-1034.

An extensive body of literature concerning obesity already exists, but this paper seeks to map the field of an... more An extensive body of literature concerning obesity already exists, but this paper seeks to map the field of an emerging body of work that is critical of that dominant discourse. Although it has been most recently mobilised by the rhetoric of an assumed global obesity epidemic, or moral panic around fatness, Fat Studies has an extensive history and interdisciplinary literature which questions and problematises traditional understandings of obesity and draws upon the language, culture and theory of civil rights, social justice and social change. Fat Studies enables the reframing of the problem of obesity, where it is not the fat body that is at issue, but the cultural production of fatphobia. Given the powerful commercial, ideological and institutional interest in maintaining dominant obesity discourse, such reframing is contested. Nevertheless, this paper demonstrates that Fat Studies offers dynamic new possibilities for social scientists interested in using fat as an interrogative lens.