A Missed Encounter: Stuart Hall and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM)

The relationship between the british LGSM movement and Hall's theories

Queer Hegemonies: Politics and Ideology in Contemporary Queer Debates

In this dissertation, I explore contemporary transformations of both sexual politics and queer theory from a politico-philosophical perspective. On the one hand, I analyze how progressive sexual politics have been recently articulated to the politico-economic project of neoliberalism and to new forms of racism, nationalism, and imperialism. Thus, the dissertation is situated within contemporary queer debates on \u201chomonormativity\u201d (Duggan 2003), \u201chomonationalism\u201d (Puar 2007), and \u201csexual imperialism\u201d (Massad 2007). On the other hand, I focus on how queer theory has responded to these political transformations. I read both processes\u2014the transformations of contemporary sexual politics and the transformations of the queer theoretical field\u2014through the theory of hegemony that Stuart Hall appropriated from Antonio Gramsci and reactivated in Britain in the 1980s, in the context of Thatcherism (see Hall 1986; 1988). The central goal of the dissertation is to explore the ways in which the conceptual apparatus developed by Hall in that context can help us better understand today, thirty years later, both the transformations of progressive sexual politics and the transformations of the queer theoretical field. In the first chapter, I focus on Hall\u2019s work. First, I discuss Hall\u2019s politico-philosophical interventions: his reading of Gramsci, his theory of politics and ideology, his analyses of Thatcherism, and his critical dialogues with key contemporary interlocutors, especially Louis Althusser and Ernesto Laclau. Second, I zoom in on some key political moments of the construction of Thatcherite hegemony. Hence, in the next two chapters, I turn to contemporary queer debates. In the second chapter, I explore Lisa Duggan\u2019s (2003) work on homonormativity: a gay politics ideologically aligned with the politico-economic project of neoliberalism. While the first part of this chapter is devoted to Duggan\u2019s analysis, the rest of it reconstructs the transformations of queer theory in the face of this shift of the politico-ideological terrain. Here, I situate both a \u201cMarxist renaissance\u201d in queer theory (see Floyd 2009) and the emergence of queer of color critique (see Ferguson 2004). I read the relation between homonormativity and these two emerging theoretical formations through Hall\u2019s theory of hegemony. Finally, in the third chapter, I turn to Jasbir K. Puar\u2019s (2007) critique of homonationalism and Joseph A. Massad\u2019s (2007) critique of sexual imperialism. First of all, I reconstruct their respective analyses as instances of queer diasporic critique (see Gopinath 2005). Hence, I pose a question of theoretical practice: while criticizing U.S. and European imperialism, to what extent are these diasporic critiques located in the global North able to articulate the concrete struggles around sexual politics emerging in the South? Each chapter ends with a political vignette that supplements the theoretical debates. In the conclusion, I draw on my analyses and on such vignettes in order to profile what I term, following Hall once again, a \u201cqueer Marxism without guarantees.\u201

Crossfire: Postcolonial Theory between Marxist and Decolonial Critiques

This article stages a confrontation between postcolonial theory and the decolonial option on the terrain of their respective engagements with Marxism. While prominent decolonial critics accuse postcolonial theory of relying too much on ‘Eurocentric’ theories, including Western Marxism, the article argues that this critique ignores what has been in fact a long-standing debate between postcolonial theory and its Marxist critics. Thus, the article questions this decolonial characterization and locates postcolonial theory itself in the crossfire of Marxist and decolonial critiques. First, it outlines the main objections that Marxist critics have formulated against postcolonial theory. Next, it discusses the decolonial critiques of postcolonial theory with an emphasis on the role played by Marxism in this confrontation. Finally, it proposes a ‘relinking’ between postcolonial theory and Marxism, understood not as a closure of the debate between these two theoretical formations but rather as an effort to hold that debate open. The article identifies the space of this open debate between postcolonial theory and its Marxist critics as a vantage point from which to articulate a critical response to the decolonial intervention

A Missed Encounter: Stuart Hall and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM)

In 2014, the movie Pride written by Stephen Beresford and directed by Matthew Warchus brought to the attention of a national and international general public the story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), which had been largely forgotten within the London LGBTQ community itself. LGSM were a solidarity group active in the 1984-85 British miners’ strike. They formed in London a few months into the strike and forged a coalition with the miners based on material support, solidarity, and a shared will to resist the attacks launched by Thatcherism in the 1980s on organized labor as well as black, feminist, and gay and lesbian communities and movements. Pride was released only a few months after Stuart Hall’s passing in February 2014. Hall has been one of the key interpreters of the 1980s in Britain. His work at the time shed light on the conjunctural triangulation between the rise of Thatcherism, the crisis of the left, and the consolidation of ‘identity’ as a terrain of political struggle broken open by intersecting social movements such as feminism, black power, and lesbian and gay liberation. Despite the powerful resonances that exist between the story of LGSM and Hall’s thinking on the renewal of the left in the 1980s, Hall adopted a very skeptical position on the miners' strike and experience of feminist, black, and lesbian and gay support groups for the miners barely appeared in his analyses. In this article, I interrogate this missed encounter between Hall and LGSM

Two Theories of Hegemony: Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau in Conversation

This essay stages a critical conversation between Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau, comparing their different appropriations of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. In the 1980s, Hall and Laclau engaged with Gramsci and with one another in order to conceptualize what they regarded as a triangular relation between the rise of Thatcherism, the crisis of the Left, and the emergence of new social movements. While many of their readers emphasize the undeniable similarities and mutual influences that exist between Hall and Laclau, this essay focuses on the differences between their theories of hegemony and locates the starkest contrast between them at the level of theoretical practice. While the main lesson that Hall drew from Gramsci was the privileging of conjunctural analysis, Laclau proceeded to locate the concept of hegemony at a higher level of abstraction, developing a political ontology increasingly indifferent to any specific conjuncture. The essay argues that this difference between conjunctural analysis and political ontology has a significant impact on Hall’s and Laclau’s respective understandings of two key political formations: populism and identity politics. Thus by focusing on these two formations, the essay argues that Hall’s work should not be read as a derivative or even undertheorized version of Laclau’s, for this tendency obscures substantial differences between their interventions as well as the fact that Hall’s theory of hegemony, as a theory of the conjuncture, ultimately possesses stronger explanatory power than Laclau’s political ontology

A Missed Encounter: Stuart Hall and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM)

The relationship between the british LGSM movement and Hall's theories

A Missed Encounter: Stuart Hall and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM)

The relationship between the british LGSM movement and Hall's theories

Omonazionalismo nel Belpaese?

Questo capitolo tematizza la posizione obliqua dell’Italia rispetto alle riconfigurazioni “omonazionaliste” delle politiche sessuali statunitensi e nord-europee dopo l’11 settembre. Il termine “omonazionalismo” – coniato da Jasbir K. Puar (2007) per descrivere i meccanismi di collusione tra il progressivo accesso di gay e lesbiche (prevalentemente bianchi) ai registri simbolici e materiali dello stato-nazione e la razzializzazione di popolazioni e soggetti “altri” – può esercitare il suo potenziale critico nel contesto italiano solo se accompagnato da una certa dose di traduzione e spiazzamento. Situata ai margini dell’impero, l’Italia non si presta del tutto a un’importazione immediata del termine. Eppure, da questa posizione “fuori e dentro le democrazie sessuali” (Facciamo Breccia 2011) emergono intersezioni tra politiche della sessualità, razzismo e nazionalismo che il termine “omonazionalismo” può aiutarci a comprendere e che, viceversa, possono illuminare spazi di critica altrimenti invisibili al cuore dell’impero. Dopo una breve introduzione agli aspetti chiave del dibattito europeo e statunitense sull’omonazionalismo, e dopo aver decostruito l’idea secondo cui in Italia, per così dire, l’omonazionalismo non ce lo possiamo (ancora) permettere, il capitolo offre una lettura di due “testi culturali italiani” per mostrare come eterosessismo, omonormatività e razzismo possano articolarsi secondo modalità specifiche ai margini dell’Europa e come un senso peculiare di “perifericità” intervenga in queste intersezioni. La scommessa è che lo scenario italiano – così letto – possa gettare nuova luce sugli scenari omonazionalisti contemporanei in Europa