Intersecting Gender and Sexuality in United States Feminist and LGBTQI Mobilizations, 19th–21st Centuries

Abstract

This panel will explore the mutual influence between gender- and sexuality-based divisions, hierarchies, and identities in feminist and LGBTQI mobilizations in the United States from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Additionally, as the two movements have been linked, for example in the 1960s and 1970s, this panel will be an opportunity to place a discussion of their complex interplay in a broader time-frame. While intersectionality is the focus of a growing body of social movement scholarship and of sex/gender and sexuality scholarship, a historical and spatial perspective may broaden our understanding of the issue. Drawing on Verta Taylor’s description of the United States as “a social movement society,” a specific focus on the US is an opportunity to wonder about the remaining pertinence of the national scale in the age of globalization: while social movements today undeniably do take place in a globalized setting, is there an encompassing American narrative of these two movements’ intersections? Do pre-globalization identity constructions and mobilization strategies resonate with current issues and contexts? And do US-based feminist and LGBTQI movements have a distinctive way of “doing” gender and sexuality as a result of their historical and institutional context? If so, what are history and sociology’s idiosyncratic contributions to this discussion—be it in theoretical or methodological terms? The panel will be composed of historians, sociologists and American studies scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, which additionally raises the question of what specific contribution non-US-based scholars can make to an understanding of US social movements and, conversely, what the study of US-based movements contributes to European social movement and sex/gender and sexuality scholarships.

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