Gay Is the New White (Gay Is the New Straight)

2016 ◽  
pp. 264-274
Author(s):  
Devon W. Carbado

This chapter challenges the misappropriation of African American civil rights struggles by white LGBT advocates who present themselves as the victims of discrimination akin to that suffered by blacks, and, in the process, continue to marginalize the experiences of African Americans who are LGBT. Historically, pro-gay rights advocacy has reflected a racial ideology that invokes black civil rights symbols, political victories, and legal reforms, on the one hand, and elides contemporary black disadvantage and social inequality, on the other. The chapter shows how this “gay rights color blindness” deploys African American identity and civil rights history to advance a gay rights agenda in which black LGBT people are nowhere to be found and blackness, more generally, is marked as an identity whose civil rights aspirations have already been fulfilled.

Author(s):  
Edward G. Goetz

This chapter describes the tension between integration and community development from the 1940s through the end of the 1960s. It describes the conflict within the African-American community between efforts to achieve integration on the one hand and building power and capacity within the community on the other. It describes the emergence and evolution of the fair housing movement in the U.S. Finally, the ways in which this conflict played out during the civil rights and Black Power eras is highlighted.


Author(s):  
Emily Ruth Rutter

As with August Wilson and Gloria Naylor (chapter 3), chapter 4’s poets—Yusef Komunyakaa, Michael S. Harper, Quincy Troupe, and Harmony Holiday—view black baseball as a vehicle for exposing racial degradation on the one hand and maintaining collective pride on the other. While they hold distinct vantage points and Holiday is of a younger, post-Civil Rights generation, these poets are all invested in shedding light on the paradoxical emotions educed by the memory of black baseball, illuminating what it felt like to be systematically excluded from the national pastime and, ultimately, mainstream civic life. In the process, Komunyakaa, Harper, Troupe, and Holiday continue to mine and enrich an “archive of feelings,” which includes the resonances and ephemera that are not housed within museums or captured in statistical records but are nonetheless vital resources for reconstructing the interior lives of marginalized people.


Author(s):  
Stephen J.Hunt

One of the major deliberations, indeed source of conflict, within and between Christian churches across the globe is what might be termed the ‘gay debate’. This debate is not merely related to the legitimacy of civil marriages, gay clergy, alongside the broader issue of the citizenship and well-being of gay people within the churches, but has expanded to embrace other forms of non-heterosexuality, including bi-sexuality and transgenderism/sexuality and issues regarding their natures. The debate has also been impacted by matters of secular civil rights and the human rights upon which they are contingent. Christian churches, alongside additional faith communities, are now forced to confront legislation that increasingly sanctions matters of citizenship and equality for non-heterosexual people in the wider social context. This paper considers the major Christian debates in the UK and how both those sympathetic to the cause of gay rights and those opposed are forced to integrate the rhetoric of rights into their respective platforms. Analysis includes examination of the contestation between those advancing such rights on the one hand, and those who oppose them on the basis of religious morality and conscience, in short, religious rights, on the other.


Slavic Review ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven S. Lee

In this article, Sacha Baron Cohen'sBoratappears as just the latest in a decades- long exchange between American and Soviet models of minority uplift: on the one side, civil rights and multiculturalism; on the other,druzhba narodov(the friendship of peoples) andmnogonatsional'nost’(multi-national- ness). Steven S. Lee argues diat, with Borat, multiculturalism seems to have emerged as the victor in this exchange, but that the film also hearkens to a not-too-distant Soviet alternative. Part 1 shows how Borat gels with recent leftist critiques of multiculturalism, spearheaded by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj żižek. Part 2 relates Borat to a largely submerged history of American minorities drawing hope from mnogonatsional'nost', as celebrated in Grigorii Aleksandrov's 1936 filmCircus.The final part presents Borat as choosing neither multiculturalism nor mnogonatsional'nost', but rather the continued opposition of the two, if not a “third way.” For a glimpse of what this might look like, the paper concludes with a discussion ofAbsurdistan(2006) by Soviet Jewish American novelist Gary Shteyngart.


Author(s):  
Michelle J. Anderson

Rape law often condemns females who are not chaste and excuses males who act with sexual entitlement. Rape law has been a significant site for the valorization of female chastity and constraint, on the one hand, and male prowess and freedom, on the other. It continues to reflect the sexism of a culture resistant to ceding male control over sexuality. Legal reform of rape law over the past forty years has greatly helped those who experience stranger rape that includes violence extrinsic to the rape itself. However, this generation of reform did not sufficiently help those whose experiences are more common: those raped by acquaintances without extrinsic violence. To tackle this larger problem, the law must undergo another generation of renewal, one that works affirmatively to diminish the legal impact of negative social attitudes toward acquaintance rape victims. Tis article proposes a range of legal reforms to that end.


2019 ◽  
pp. 114-135
Author(s):  
David Brydan

Social experts played an important but contested role in Francoist attempts to establish Spain as an influential power in Latin America during the 1940s and 1950s. By encouraging Spanish experts to form ties with their Latin American colleagues, the Franco regime aimed to promote an image of itself as modern, scientific, and technically advanced on the one hand, and as socially progressive on the other. Despite the significant resources dedicated to this task, the Francoist narrative was strongly resisted both by Latin American leftists and by exiled Republican social experts who promoted a more collaborative model of Ibero-American identity. Nevertheless, Latin America did offer a route through which Francoist experts were able to engage with wider forms of international health and welfare. In areas such as social security, it also provided an opportunity for the regime to promote its vision of Francoist modernity to the outside world.


Author(s):  
Carol Bunch Davis

This book challenges the cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle era that hinges on a master narrative focused on the “heroic period” of the Civil Rights Movement. It argues that this narrative limits the representation of African American identity within the Civil Rights Movement to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest leadership in the segregated South and casts Malcolm X's advocacy of black nationalism and the ensuing Black Power/Arts Movement as undermining civil rights advances. Through an analysis of five case studies of African American identity staged in plays between 1959 and 1969, the book instead offers representations that engage, critique, and revise racial uplift ideology and reimagine the Black Arts Movement's sometimes proscriptive notions of black authenticity as a condition of black identity and cultural production. It also posits a postblack ethos as the means by which these representations construct their counternarratives to cultural memory and broadens narrow constructions of African American identity shaping racial discourse in the U.S. public sphere of the 1960s.


2020 ◽  
pp. 180-240
Author(s):  
Michael Goldfield

Chapter 5 highlights the wood industry, one of the largest industries in the country. Most of the woodworkers were located in the South, and half of those workers were African-American. Woodworkers successfully organized in the Northwest and Canada, the other two centers of the industry. Despite a perceived willingness of southern woodworkers to unionize, this did not happen. The chapter attributes most of the problems to an incompetent, right-wing, racially backward leadership, which was installed by the CIO national office before World War II. The chapter also argues that the successful organization of southern woodworkers had the potential to radically transform the civil rights movement.


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