Duggan_After Neoliberalism From Crisis to Organizing for Queer Economic Justice

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After Neoliberalism? From Crisis to

Organizing for Queer Economic Justice

By Lisa DugganAs the global economy of neoliberal capitalism has emerged, grown, and ricocheted from

boom to crisis over the past four decades, its logics have acquired the status of mainstream

common sense and inevitability, as asserted by the slogan, there is no alternative. But

resistance has nonetheless flourished, from the rain forests and nations of South America to

the anticorporate globalization movement to the uprisings of the Arab Spring. In the United

States beginning in 2011, the Occupy movement has spread from Wall Street to cities in the

United States and around the globe, drawing from and merging with existing global protests.

All of this resistance has opened significant ground for questioning politics and economics as

usual. For those of us on the broadly defined political left, this is our time, our chance. During

the next decade or two, we may be able to end the brutal reign of neoliberalism, and expandalternative forms of social, cultural, political, and economic life.

As queer leftists look toward our participation in building possible new futures, we need to

attend to the most important thing: our constituencies need to become fully literate in

economic policy. During the past two decades, mainstream lesbian and gay organizations

have increasingly supported rather than opposed neoliberal modes of governance. But how

can we provide an effective critique when many of us, in the United States in particular, dont

understand what neoliberalismis? We need to understand what the Federal Reserve is doing,

how Wall Street works, how interest rates affect employment rates, how different health care

systems really work, and so much more. Economic policy and basic vocabulary have been

mystifiedwe arentsupposedto understand it. Were supposed to think that economics is a

highly complex problem of technical management. It isnt. The economyas such does not

even exist as a fully concrete and discrete object of analysis. It is a historical invention, falsely

abstracted from the operations of culture and politics more broadly. Under neoliberal

dominance, more and more of the functions of collective life have been assigned or

transferred toprivatecorporate control, removed from the democratic accountability of the

publicsphere of our common life. As public life in the United States has been increasingly,

deliberately impoverished by the underfunding of government agencies, weve been

encouraged to believe that theprivateeconomy is more efficient and reliable than public

action. We have seen the result of those policies, from Katrina to the 2008 collapse of the

minimally (and badly) regulated financial industry. In the global South, Western support forneoliberal dictators from Pinochet to Mubarak has worked to identify the state with the racial

imperialism of the West. But this support has also generated significant and increasingly

widespread resistance. The legacy of empire has generated highly class-stratified, gendered,

and racialized societies. Neoliberalism has extended that legacy to leave us with minimal

social service and high national security states in much of the world, combined with low-wage

and low-benefit economies. These legacies are increasingly being exposed. It is time for

regime changes and for major transformations of our networked communities.

So what might we on the queer left do to participate in, shape, and create the new worlds that

appear increasingly possible? Here are some suggestions:
http://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/about-the-contributors/#lisa-dugganhttp://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/about-the-contributors/#lisa-dugganhttp://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/about-the-contributors/#lisa-duggan


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Work to organizeLGBT constituencies, by creating networks to link the grassrootsorganizations that are already doing astonishingly creative and productive work.

Existing queer-of-color organizations, and those involved with poverty issues, are

models for expansion and networking. Groups in New York City, includingQueers for

Economic Justice,The Audre Lorde Project,theSylvia Rivera Law Project,and

FIERCE,are expanding their communications and connections. The more theseconnections expand nationally and transnationally, through newly established

networks, and via the Occupy movement and the World or US Social Forum and other

sites, the more effective queer progressive voices can be. We need sites to circulate

new ideas and to plan actions.

Underwrite researchinto and analysisof the needs and dreams of the LGBT/queerpopulation, not only within the United States but also across borders. LGBT

movement leaders and organizations have too often collaborated in some of the

mistakes of the nonprofit world in generalemphasizing the practical skills needed to

forward an already set agenda, while deploying an anti-intellectual discourse,

denigrating the analytic and imaginative labor required to create and transform one.

Right now, we need all of our sharp minds in full gear analyzing abstract concepts andvocabularies as they come at us, as well as our practical strategic and tactical sense.

We need as much knowledge as we can collect, and we need to understand everything

thats being said and done in our name. Some data on the LGB population of

California, collected and analyzed by Gary J. Gates and Christopher Ramos of the

Williams Institute at UCLA (2008), is highly instructive.[1]The researchers creatively

combined results from the 2005/2006 American Community Survey compiled by the

US Census Bureau with data from the 2003 and 2005 California Health Survey to

create a very useful and illuminating picture of the LGB demographic in California

(they had no existing data on the transgender or intersex population). Though the data

is interpreted to support the campaign for marriage equality, the numbers actually

show that the majority of LGB individuals in California are not coupled, and that

white and highly educated gay men and lesbians are the most likely to be partnered. If

we take their data at face value, and derive a set of truly democratic policy priorities

from them, we would come up with a very different vision for LGB and transgender,

intersex, and other queer actionchild care, health care, progressive immigration

reform, more egalitarian and democratic employment practices, affordable housing,

and social support provisions, for instance, would come out ranked highly. Creating

and proposing forms of relationship and household recognition designed for diverse

living arrangements (including nonconjugal households) might replace marriage

only as a policy priority. Thinking of alternatives to neoliberal capitalist economic

organization might even come up quite clearly on our to-do list. Continue to generate and press forward with a friendly critiqueof the agenda of the

mainstream LGBT organizations. The emphasis on the 3Msinclusion in the major

neoliberal institutions of marriage, the military, and the marketreflects the priorities

of a neoliberal era. During the 1990s, this agenda developed in direct relation to the

rhetorical requirements of recognitionin an economically conservative era. After

neoliberalism, we need to emphasize transforming these institutions in ways that meet

the needs of more of us, rather than simply plead or settle for inclusion in the status

quo.

Our time is now. Lets not waste it.

Footnotes
http://q4ej.org/http://q4ej.org/http://q4ej.org/http://q4ej.org/http://alp.org/http://alp.org/http://alp.org/http://srlp.org/http://srlp.org/http://srlp.org/http://www.fiercenyc.org/http://www.fiercenyc.org/http://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/after-neoliberalism-from-crisis-to-organizing-for-queer-economic-justice/#footnote_0_74http://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/after-neoliberalism-from-crisis-to-organizing-for-queer-economic-justice/#footnote_0_74http://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/after-neoliberalism-from-crisis-to-organizing-for-queer-economic-justice/#footnote_0_74http://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/after-neoliberalism-from-crisis-to-organizing-for-queer-economic-justice/#footnote_0_74http://www.fiercenyc.org/http://srlp.org/http://alp.org/http://q4ej.org/http://q4ej.org/


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1. The Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, Gary J. Gates and ChristopherRamos, Census Snapshots: California Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Population,

October 2008(PDF).Accessed November 13, 2011. [Return to text]

http://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/after-neoliberalism-from-crisis-to-organizing-for-

queer-economic-justice/
http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Gates-Ramos-CA-Snapshot-Oct-2008.pdfhttp://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Gates-Ramos-CA-Snapshot-Oct-2008.pdfhttp://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Gates-Ramos-CA-Snapshot-Oct-2008.pdfhttp://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/after-neoliberalism-from-crisis-to-organizing-for-queer-economic-justice/#identifier_0_74http://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/after-neoliberalism-from-crisis-to-organizing-for-queer-economic-justice/#identifier_0_74http://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/after-neoliberalism-from-crisis-to-organizing-for-queer-economic-justice/#identifier_0_74http://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/after-neoliberalism-from-crisis-to-organizing-for-queer-economic-justice/#identifier_0_74http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Gates-Ramos-CA-Snapshot-Oct-2008.pdf

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Duggan_After Neoliberalism From Crisis to Organizing for Queer Economic Justice