Some Themes of Interest

We've finished our first full day of sessions and workshops, and although I've attended a target/selective/biased set of sessions, all focused on LGBTQ issues, I've noticed a couple of themes that seem like they might form interesting research questions. I'm initially just curious if other people are running into these same kinds of issues.

1. Are we radical enough? This one has come up in every session I've been in both in direct and indirect ways. It's inevitable in a large gathering of diverse activists, of course, that there will be people who have more and less radical ideas about tactics, agendas, outcomes, and so forth, but I curious about the drift in this thinking over time and how people may be engaging and shifting with their own commitments to radical action as a result of attending the forum and making connections with others who are an a different page in terms of being radical. Of course, you have to define what is meant by "radical" in the first place too--which is another discussion that is happening. I've heard several people asking "Am I radical?"

2. Imperialism. Last night in the lobby "office" (read: free wi-fi spot by Starbucks!) we started in on a pretty interesting discussion about the way the term imperialism is being used at the conference. The definition seems to be VERY broad and, in my view at least, is something like "anything bad that happens in the world that can be construed as having implications for a nation-state." I'm not so interested in whether that definition is "right" or "wrong" but rather about how activists are wielding the term as a framing tool, how useful it might be in terms of creating some resonance with other audiences, and how they are negotiating the meaning of the term amongst themselves, and in dialogue with people outside the U.S. (given that we mainly have US activists here).

3. Connecting Agendas. I've heard a couple of people taking now about the attempts they have observed of groups to attach their agendas into what we might perceive as being the broad over-arching theme and purpose of the USSF. In my case, I attended a session about LGBTQ people in Muslim communities (both in the U.S. and elsewhere). During the session, the presenters didn't spend a lot of time on this, but they made a nice connection by tracing some of the difficulties LGBTQ people face back to what they called imperialist activities. The short version of the idea was that these imperialist activities energize fundamentalist reactions and these fundamentalist reactions, in turn, fuel norms and activities that make life more difficult and dangerous for LGBTQ folks. I'm not sure how resonant this idea was, and I have to admit that my experience of the LGBTQ sessions so far is that they aren't well integrated into the overall USSF experience. They're not totally disconnected either, but there is a sense of distance or separateness in some way.

OK, that's enough for one post!