Description
Book SynopsisIn June 1973, amid ideological rifts in the U.S. gay liberation movement, thousands of people gathered in New York City''s Washington Square Park to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. Partway through the rally, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) co-founder Sylvia Rivera fought her way to the stage to address the predominantly white, middle class lesbian and gay crowd. Over the din of their boos and jeers, Rivera reprimanded the crowd for failing in their responsibilities to their gay brothers and sisters in jail, detailed the sacrifices she had made for the movement, and called them into the politics of STAR, The people who are trying to do something for all of us and not men and women that belong to a white middle class white club! And that is what you all belong to! Rivera''s appeal thus worked through a push-pull of distance and belonging, shaming the movement for its assimilatory turn while invoking forms of kinship and calling her listeners into an expansive multi-issue liberation politics. How does a sense of intimacy call people into political community? If We Were Kin is about the we of politics--how that we is made, fought over, and remade--and how these struggles lie at the very core of questions about power and political change. Across a range of sites in racial justice and queer/trans liberation movements--from speeches by James Baldwin and Sylvia Rivera in the 1960s and 1970s to contemporary immigrant justice campaigns by the antiracist LGBTQ organization Southerners on New Ground (SONG)--Lisa Beard traces a distinct lineage of appeals that challenge atomized and hierarchical racial formations in the United States and advance powerful visions of political relationships rooted in mutuality and shared freedom. In plumbing the deeper registers of identificatory appeals, Beard transforms understandings of identity, solidarity, political confrontation, and apparent loss/failure as points of possibility. If We Were Kin offers an innovative account of racial politics and political theory rooted in Black, Latinx, queer, and trans activism in twentieth and twenty-first century America.
Trade ReviewIn If We Were Kin, Lisa Beard has crafted a work of urgent beauty, offering readers a powerful exploration of identification and the many ways people come to understand themselves politically. Drawing on a vibrant tradition of Black, Latinx, queer, and trans activism, organizing, and theorizing, Beard moves from civil rights and Black Lives Matter activism to rural southern LGBTQ+ kinship organizations, to migrant justice struggles to far-right political campaigns, crafting a rich and ideologically capacious account of identificatory appeals and what such appeals make possible. Through both methodology and archive, Beard reminds us that the struggle to forge a larger and more just sense of who we are is the democratic challenge of our time. * Cristina Beltrán, author of The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity *
Beard brilliantly invites our exploration of these activists' kin, their people. Reading this book, I felt like I was sitting around a breakfast table with them, wanting another biscuit, but not willing to interrupt the conversation. * Pat Hussain, co-founder of Southerners On New Ground *
Lisa Beard offers eloquent and compelling readings of an archive of antiracist (and) queer/trans political speech in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. If We Were Kin shows how an array of visionary activists tune into the frequency of intimacy as they craft calls to political identification that foreground rather than elide the structural violence of racism. An illuminating and thought-provoking read for scholars and builders of social movements alike. * Emily L. Thuma, author of All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence *
If We Were Kin speaks particularly and powerfully to racial and gender politics in the United States. In doing so, it makes substantial theoretical additions to today's most urgent conversations about political freedom and transformation. * Choice *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Intimate Appeals Chapter 1: "For Your Gay Brothers and Your Gay Sisters in Jail": Sylvia Rivera's Countercall Chapter 2: "Flesh of Their Flesh, Bone of Their Bone": James Baldwin's Kinship Politics Chapter 3: "You Have to Hear What's Being Said to You": Hansberry and Horne's Interruption Interlude: "My Friends, These People Are Our People": Pat Buchanan's Nostalgic and Demonological Appeals Chapter 4: "Igniting the Kindred": Southerners On New Ground's Family Values Conclusion: "Remember That Feeling Because It's the Same Cage": Appeals to Boundness Notes Bibliography Index
