One-Dimensional Queer

The story of gay rights has long been told as one of single-minded focus on the fight for sexual freedom. Yet the origins of modern queer liberation are much more complicated and dynamic than this single-issue interpretation would have us believe. As Roderick Ferguson argues in this revisionist reassertion, to ignore gay liberation's multi-dimensional beginnings is to drastically underestimate its radical potential for social change.

Ferguson shows how gay liberation emerged out of various insurgent struggles crossing the politics of race, gender, class, and sexuality, and deeply connected to issues of colonization, incarceration, and capitalism. Tracing the rise and fall of this intersectional politics, he argues that the one-dimensional mainstreaming of queerness placed critiques of racism, political economy, and the state outside the remit of gay liberation, thereby supporting the notion that social and political freedom would come through capitalism. As recent intersectional queer activism is increasingly making clear, this one-dimensional legacy has promoted forms of racial, gender, and class exclusion that marginalize people of color, the poor, transgender individuals, and queers of color. This forceful book joins the call to reimagine and reconnect the fight for social justice in all its varied forms.

Roderick Ferguson is Professor of African American and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago