The Queer Commons

The conventional idea of the commons—a resource managed by the community that uses it—might appear anachronistic as global capitalism attempts to privatize and commodify social life. Against these trends, contemporary queer energies have been directed toward commons-forming initiatives from activist provision of social services to the maintenance of networks around queer art, protest, public sex, and bar cultures that sustain queer lives otherwise marginalized by heteronormative society and mainstream LGBTQ politics. This issue forges a connection between the common and the queer, asking how the category “queer” might open up a discourse that has emerged as one of the most important challenges to contemporary neoliberalization at both the theoretical and practical level.

Contributors look to radical networks of care, sex, and activism present within diverse queer communities including HIV/AIDS organizing, the Wages for Housework movement, New York’s Clit Club community, and trans/queer collectives in San Francisco. The issue also includes a dossier of shorter contributions that offer speculative provocations about the radicalism of queer commonality across time and space, from Gezi Park uprisings in Turkey to future visions of collectivity outside of the internet.

Contributors
Arlen Austin, Zach Blas, Gavin Butt, Beth Capper, Ashon Crawley, Amalle Dublon, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Christina Hanhardt, Nadja Millner-Larsen, José Esteban Muñoz, Cenk Ozbay, Evren Savci, Eric Stanley

Gavin Butt is Attenborough Chair of Drama, Theatre and Performance at University of Sussex.

Nadja Millner-Larsen is Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.