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“Transformations without Revolutions?: How Feminist and LGBTQI Movements Have Changed the World,” Volume 2 (2015)

Introduction

A tension between the notions of revolution and the one of transformation lie at the heart of each of the essays in this volume. By focusing on the cases of international feminist and LGBTQI movements, this volume investigates different modalities of social and political change, questions the fundamental definitions in this debate and, most importantly, emphasizes the importance of gender and sexuality as a terrain of negotiation for political alternatives. In so doing, it unsettles the common view of revolutions as radical subversions of the existing order, and on transformations as the results of moderate compromises. Thus it overcomes a simplistic view on the dialectic between normalization and change. In fact, focusing on gender and sexuality opens the way for an analysis of the changes that have taken place within the intimate dimensions of everyday life. Doing so also provides us with the opportunity to talk about the embodied dimension of people’s experiences, and to question the gender biases that exist in the predominant political languages and imaginaries. Finally, it invites us to go beyond factual analysis and to look at the role of collective imagination and shared knowledge, and thus to interrogate how not only actions but also transformative desires can serve as revolutionary tools.

As editors of this volume, we have chosen this theme out of our previous activist and research experiences, mainly located in Europe (Italy, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) and partly addressed to the study of these movements. We became passionate about the languages and practices that feminist and LGBTQI movements have used since the sixties. Gays, lesbians, transsexual and transgender individuals represented themselves as ‘revolutionary,’ in Europe and in the United States. They were upsetting and re-appropriating the insults they used to receive — as ‘faggots’ — in order to build up their own identity in the struggle, pushing social boundaries and the collective imagination towards a new public discourse about themselves, starting from a collective action.

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Table of Contents

Introduction
∴ Sabrina Marchetti, Vincenza Perilli, and Elena Petricola, eds.


“If I can’t dance, it ain’t my revolution”: Queer-Feminist Inquiries into Pink Bloque’s Revolutionary Strategies
∴ Dominique Grisard and Barbara Biglia


Gender and Revolutions: Critique Interrupted
∴ Norma Claire Moruzzi


Feminism and Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean
∴ Valeria Ribeiro Corossacz


Gender, Sexuality, and Politics: Rethinking the Relationship Between Feminism and Sandinismo in Nicaragua
∴ Silke Heumann


Liberation or (Neoliberal) Freedom? Exploring the Evolution of Lesbian and Gay Urban Spaces in the Global North
∴ Cesare Di Feliciantonio


Gay Normality and Queer Transformation
∴ Peter Drucker


Feminism, Science, and the Feminist Critique of Science
∴ Elisabetta Donini


Anti-Racist, Queer, and Radical Feminisms in the Quebec Antiauthoritarian Movement
∴ Emilie Breton, Sandra Jeppesen, Anna Kruzynski, and Rachel Sarrasin


Family Problems: Debates over Coupling, Marriage, and Family within the Italian Lesbian Community, 1990s
∴ Elena Biagini


Afterword, or Dreams of Revolution
∴ Eileen Boris

 

Volume Resources

Yesterday
∴ Digital scholarly resources, archival links, images and more related to the topic of this volume.


Today
Global and local organizations, movements, and networks inspired by the traditions explored in this volume.