The Radical Potential of LGBTQ Activism

Anthropological studies of LGBTQ activism around the world in recent decades offer insights into what political scientist Cathy Cohen called the “radical potential” of coalitions rooted less in LGBTQ identity than in countering interlocking oppressions. Accordingly, this article focuses on ways that anthropological scholarship has ethnographically studied LGBTQ activism not as sites of identity, but rather as scenes of unending nonsublimation of differences in embodied navigations of race, gender, sex, caste, and class. This work features scenes of transnational interlinkages in restructurations of sexual and erotic subjectivities, decolonial strivings to upend exploitative extractions of value from marginalized people and landscapes, and spiritual activism that seeks their material survival and flourishing through more just redistributions of pleasure and care.