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Millner-Larsen, Nadja;Butt, Gavin;Butt, Gavin;Millner-Larsen, Nadja
doi: 10.1215/10642684-6957744pmid: N/A
Ideas and practices of “the commons” have been urgently explored in recent years in attempts to forge alternatives to global capitalism and its privatizing enclosures of social life. Contemporary queer energies have been directed to commons-forming initiatives that sustain queer lives otherwise marginalized by heteronormative society and mainstream LGBTQ politics: from activist provision of social services to the maintenance of networks around queer art, protest, public sex, and bar cultures. However, such instances of queer political action and imagination have rarely been recognized within extant discourses of the commons. This introduction sets out differing genealogies of thought within scholarship on the commons and, building on the work of the performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz, it asks how, if at all, it is possible to theorize a queer commons.
Hanhardt, Christina B.;Butt, Gavin;Millner-Larsen, Nadja
doi: 10.1215/10642684-6957758pmid: N/A
At the start of the 1990s the New York chapter of the activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was essential to the continuation of needle exchanges, which provide clean syringes to injection drug users without disapprobation or discipline and have been shown to reduce rates of HIV transmission. ACT UP’s participation in needle exchange was part of an effort to build connections between political actors, especially across race and class lines, as the group sought a more expansive understanding of who was affected by HIV/AIDS. These efforts have been largely overlooked in the recent attention to ACT UP’s legacy. This article asks what the history of ACT UP’s needle exchange might tell us not only about the history of HIV/AIDS and public health but also about the ideals of health and recovery in defining the subjects, forms, and historiography of queer activist history.
Capper, Beth;Austin, Arlen;Butt, Gavin;Millner-Larsen, Nadja
doi: 10.1215/10642684-6957772pmid: N/A
In the mid-1970s, two autonomous groups within the International Wages for Housework movement formed to address black (and) lesbian struggles over social reproduction: Black Women for Wages for Housework (BWfWfH) and Wages Due Lesbians (WDL). These groups foregrounded and mobilized reproductive workers often rendered disposable or superfluous to heteronormative reproductive imaginaries. By charting the conceptual impropriety of “housework” and “lesbian” that emerge within these archives, this article highlights the tensions and coalitional possibilities that come to the fore in struggles against housework through the analytic and organizational centering of nonheteronormative socialities. Concurrently, BWfWfH and WDL are situated in relation to contemporaneous neoliberal invocations of a “commons” threatened by racialized, nonheteronormative reproduction. The article argues that the intellectual and political archives of these groups evince the inextricability of social reproduction and queer politics, while also signaling the horizon of a “queer commons” that refuses fidelity to some of the founding assumptions of commons discourse.
Tolentino, Julie;Crockett, Vivian A.;Hart, Tara;Khusro, Amira;Kang, Leeroy Kun Young;Mansion, Dragon;Butt, Gavin;Millner-Larsen, Nadja
doi: 10.1215/10642684-6957786pmid: N/A
Founded in New York City in 1990, the Clit Club was a nightclub and performance venue that offered a sex-positive, racially, economically, and culturally-mixed queer space of encounter for self-identified lesbian, gay, and trans people for over twelve years. Drawing from archival material and responses to a questionnaire previously sent to Clit Club staff, this article provides an introduction to the space, affect, and practices at the Club, and riffs on Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s concept of the undercommons, and the improvisational and renegade space it opens up. We posit the Clit Club as a sexual “undercommons” that, through the care of its dedicated staff, created a landscape of open possibilities for sexual play and social intimacy in its tiny, hot, crowded spaces. The polyvocality of this coauthored article mirrors the Clit Club’s own expression and negotiation of multiple and at times divergent perspectives among its staff and extended family. Returning to the Clit Club today also entails naming the structures that contributed to its absence from queer history, while recognizing the nuanced ways in which the Club resisted the glare of visibility and capture.
Stanley, Eric;Butt, Gavin;Millner-Larsen, Nadja
doi: 10.1215/10642684-6957800pmid: N/A
Through Indigenous critiques of the commons, this article asks what forms of collectivity might be built against the drives of settler-sovereignty. By centering various scales of forced removal and its resistance, I offer a reading of Gay Shame, a queer direct action group based in San Francisco, and its work confronting the hypergentrification of the Bay Area propelled by the tech industry. While positive attachments and shared identification are argued to be necessary for a liberatory politics, in contrast Gay Shame builds an affective commons through negative relationality. Indeed, the Left’s attachment to love as the revolutionary affect persist, yet here I center organizing where a desire for struggle collects around bad attitudes. To this end, how might queer hate delineate the ways the traffic in good feelings accelerates racial capitalism’s motors of accumulation and dispossession?
Dublon, Amalle;Butt, Gavin;Millner-Larsen, Nadja
doi: 10.1215/10642684-6957856pmid: N/A
The dossier section contains shorter writings that allow the reader to appreciate varied objects of study, and the potentially wide field of subjects and methods, relevant to the theme of a queer commons. From sound art and the internet, to urban activism and relationality, contributors present case studies, think pieces, and a poetic, epistolary exchange. In sum, these writings demonstrate the multiplicity of queer commons.
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