The Full Description of the talk — Gary Kinsman
“Queer Histories, Queer Struggles — Beyond the Neo-Liberal Queer.”
This talk is a pre-launch event for the 3rd edition of The Regulation of Desire: Queer Histories, Queer Struggles coming out in December 2023 from Concordia University Press. It will focus on moments of resistance to the emergence of the white neo liberal queer which accepts racial capitalist relations and wants simply to be included as a largely white middle class queer layer in these relations. They strive for integration into normality and wish to make us forget the radical (as in getting to the root of the problem) and transformative roots and histories of queer and trans struggles. Following a critical analysis of the same-sex marriage struggle and the 2017 apology moment the talk focuses on how the global uprising against the police and anti-Black racism and No Pride in Genocide in 2020-2021; the impact of Covid in once again abandoning ‘expendable’ people with the forgetting of what we learned from AIDS activism; and the re-emergence of a racist and anti-trans right-wing (often associated with fascist currents) has created the necessity for moving beyond a limited rights politics. Instead we need an abolitionist approach against the police, prisons and carceral injustice and the making of radical alternatives based on care and social solidarity in the present.