“Queers in the Front”: The Ethics and Affects of Queer-Led Social Justice

Abstract

“We had these big dance parties, that not only were a queer space, but also all of the money we raised would go to different organizations, all of them with a social justice focus, and most of them queers at the front” said Jane (she/hers), who I met in 2017 while conducing pilot research in Portland, Maine. This dissertation is first an ethnographic documentation of Jane’s observation, that many non-gender- or -sexuality-specific social justice movements in both Portland and the U.S. are led by openly queer people. Second, it is an assertion that it matters for the way social justice political projects are imagined that in many social movements, from workers’ rights movements to movements harm reduction for people who use drugs (PWUD), that queer people make up much of the leadership and membership of these movements.

This dissertation is based on 12 months of participant observation with three social justice organizations in Portland: 1) Portland Harm Reduction Collective, an all-volunteer organization working to expand access to harm reduction services for PWUD, such as syringe service programs, through education and advocacy, 2) Northern New England Workers’ Rights Coalition, a member-led nonprofit with four paid staff members organizing for workers’ rights, and 3) Supporting Activists and Organizers in Maine, a capacity-building organization that provides resources for many social justice and grassroots efforts throughout the state. These organizations had majority queer leadership and membership, and while none were explicitly “queer,” all took a queer approach to their advocacy. In addition, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 42 social justice advocates in the Greater Portland Area.

Using this data I demonstrate that, while experiences of gender and sexuality are at the center of queer identities for these activists in Portland, “queerness” is a broader political and social project about making the distribution of emotions like love and care more just. In Chapter 3, I term these practices “queer capacious love and care.” Further, I argue in Chapter 4 that such queer political practice enriches scholarship about how activism is as much about everyday emotional relations and care work between activists as it is about policy change (Dave 2012; Mahmood 2001).

Through their “emotional work” (Ring 2006), such as how they give and receive criticism and provide rides to and food at meetings, my research participants tried to rework activists relationships across privilege, marginalization, and differences in lived experience away from normative frames like similarity or altruism (Kowal 2015; Heron 2007) and toward a model of “queer solidarity” based in difference. In navigating various activist tactics, such as policy advocacy and direct action, basing solidarity in difference led my research participants to push up against the often-fuzzy boundaries of “directly impacted people” and “lived experience.” In Chapter 5, I trace how the influence of feminist standpoint theory on the category of “lived experience” has different effects in the different settings of activism and a group of “moral experts” are emerging who are trusted to help negotiate these instabilities.

As activism is sets of practices trying to make a more just world, it is a morally saturated domain of social experience (Cassaniti and Hickman 2014). In Chapter 6, I discuss the role of nonprofits in activism and the moral tensions they present for many of my research participants and the creative ways my research participants use them as sites of care. Within the constraints of a currently unequal society, queer activists in Portland attempt to care for one another in ways that counter how inequality shapes who normally gives and receives care. While nonprofits are not morally pure sites for revolution (Shockwell 2016), they present opportunities for accommodating multiple moral values, transformative ways of caring, and practicing queer capacious love.