in the session on “Against Neoliberal Conceptions of Bodies,” at the Great Transition, 2021, “Building Utopias,” Sunday, May 23, 9:30am. https://thegreattransition.net/
Beyond Apologies, Rights, and the Police: Against the Neoliberal Queer in Pandemic Times
Gary Kinsman
The current context includes an apology to the LGBT+ communities for the purge campaigns in the public service and military, the celebration of the mythology that the Canadian government ‘decriminalized’ homosexuality in 1969, the assertion that full rights for LGBTQ+ people have been established in ‘Canada,’ and those arguing for alliances with the police in the face of Anti-Black and Anti-Indigenous racism and police brutality. It is also marked by the forgetting of the acquisitions of AIDS activism in the current pandemic. These official declarations and celebrations signaled a consolidation of the neoliberal queer and its racialized class politics of the end goal simply being acceptance into the white middle class. But this has not been an inevitable long march towards the neoliberal queer since there have been important moments of resistance to the emergence of this neoliberal queer racialized class strata. This strata is invested in actively separating 2SLGBTQ+ struggles from anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial struggles, and especially from the continuing global struggle to abolish racist policing which has become a dividing line between neoliberal queer strata and those who stand on the side of the lives of Black, Indigenous and other people of colour. This paper examines both resistance to the emergence of the neoliberal queer in the historical past and the historical present of the pandemic and the uprising against policing (including Black Lives Matter and Indigenous organizing) and what these suggest for future organizing that moves beyond the neoliberal queer and towards social liberation.