Queer Mobilizations PDF Download

This dissertation traces the history of lesbian and gay travel during the twentieth century with the aim of understanding how global circuits of exchange have shaped lesbian and gay activism in the U.S. Placing feminist and queer studies in conversation with mobility studies, I analyze the militarized relations of power at play within travel practices in order to illuminate the transnational dimensions of U.S. sexual subjects and sexual politics.In the past few decades, as activists have adopted new strategies for enacting social change, new modes of mobility have gained importance within the realm of lesbian and gay politics. This dissertation specifically considers lesbian and gay activists from the U.S. who advocate for the right to be deployed by the military, who participate in international exchanges to spread human rights, and who create opportunities to vacation with their families. I situate my investigation of contemporary travel within broader histories of mobility, sexuality, and modern subject formation, but my interest lies in how neoliberalism - as both an economic program and a mode of governmentality - produces new political subjectivities and newly configured desires for mobility. My project breaks from the tendency for studies of lesbian and gay travel to focus on the leisure practices of privileged travelers and to celebrate the visibility of lesbian and gay tourists as cosmopolitan consumers. In distinction, I broaden the question of travel beyond an investigation of tourism alone in order to outline the continuities across different mobilities and to ask how racially and economically marginalized subjects do and do not participate in these forms of travel. Through an examination of the legacies of colonialism and technologies of war undergirding lesbian and gay travel, this dissertation seeks to understand why U.S. lesbian and gay activism often works in synchrony with nationalism, militarization, and global capitalism and unwittingly upholds racialized sexual hierarchies, gendered economic structures, and hierarchies of dis/ability. At the same time, I remain attentive to inconsistencies and ambivalences within military deployments, cultural exchanges, and family vacations, and I explore the ways in which these disruptions open space for more radical modes of transnational queer politics.