Angela P. Harris

Bio: Angela P. Harris is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Judicial opinion & Sovereignty. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 26 citations.

From Stonewall to the Suburbs? Toward a Political Economy of Sexuality

Abstract: INTRODUCTION In their articles,1 Carlos Ball and Sonia Katyal step back from the heat of the moment to place two recent United States court cases concerning the rights of sexual minorities - Goodridge v. Department of Public Health2 and Lawrence v. Texas3 - into a broader perspective. Ball takes up the dimension of time. Comparing the Massachusetts Supreme Court's decision in Goodridge to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education,4 he examines the phenomenon of social and legal backlash against controversial judicial opinions in the arena of civil rights, and reminds us that backlash is foreseeable, for civil rights struggle in the United States typically consists of "moments of heartening progress followed by instances of discouraging setbacks."5 Katyal takes up the dimension of space, examining possible implications of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence for the civil rights struggles of sexual minorities in post-colonial nations, India in particular. Both Ball and Katyal are cautiously optimistic. Ball wants gay rights advocates not to despair over the recent state and federal legislative backlash against same-sex marriage, but to move the struggle from the courts to the culture, in order to persuade straight Americans that prohibitions on same-sex marriage are unacceptable restrictions on equality.6 Taking the long view, Ball argues that despite the current backlash, same-sex marriage advocates have won more than they have lost.7 Adopting the intonations of the civil rights movement, he exhorts gay and lesbian activists to win the "hearts and minds of straight Americans,"8 and, in the last line of his article, insists "that the backlash can be "overcome."9 Katyal, too, speaks with hope. She points out that the Lawrence Court did not grant protection to a "minority," but rather spoke in terms of privacy and liberty, principles that are broadly applicable to all persons.10 For Katyal, the Court in Lawrence quietly moved away from the equality-based, analogical identity reasoning that gay and lesbian activists have often been pressured into - "We are just like black people! Just like straight people!" - and toward a substantive vision of sexual self-determination, which Katyal names "sexual sovereignty."11 Though Katyal acknowledges the flaws of Lawrence - above all its connection of sexual sovereignty to the home, a site that many feminist/queer activists and theorists view as a place of danger rather than security12 - she nonetheless wishes to celebrate Lawrence as an anti-essentialist "triumph."13 Both articles are rich and thought-provoking, and there is much to praise in them. I think Ball and Katyal are right to place these court decisions in a larger context of civil rights struggle across both time and space. It is appropriate, for instance, to discuss these decisions as inseparable from questions of racial subordination and postcolonial struggle.14 It is also always appropriate to identify and celebrate openings of possibility and moments of hope. Commentary necessitates critique, however, and, in my role as commentator on these papers, I mean to offer a caution - not as a substitute but as a supplement to the posture of hope and celebration. I argue that a usefully corrective lens through which to see Brown, Lawrence, and Goodridge is the lens of political economy. This lens enables us to see different stories with different lessons than the ones Ball and Katyal extract. From a political economy perspective, Brown tells a story of the role law plays in accomplishing, to use Re va Siegel' s apt phrase, "preservation-throughtransformation."15 Through this lens, both Goodridge and Lawrence maybe seen as beacons of hope (as they surely are), but they can also be seen as invitations to what Andrew Sullivan calls (though to him it's a good, if slightly bittersweet, thing) "the end of gay culture":16 the end, that is to say, of a queer movement that means anything other than the reconsolidation of preexisting relations of privilege and subordination. …

Intimate Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seductions of Empire

Abstract: As the killing of those at the margins of liberal and neoliberal sovereignty continues to be glamorized and fetishized in the name of ‘democracy,’ we are confronted with urgent questions about the ways in which life, death, and desire are being (re)constituted in the current political moment. The intensification of carnage wrought by empire has brought with it a renewed thrust to draw in precisely those who are the most killable into performing the work of murder. As we are seduced into empire’s fold by participating, often with glee and pleasure, in the deaths of those in our own communities as well as those banished to the ‘outsides’ of citizenship and subjectivity, we must ask: How are these seductions produced and naturalized?1 What forms of (non)spectacular violence must be authorized to heed the promises being offered by empire? These are the central problematics this paper engages.2

Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform

Abstract: Critical race theory generally and intersectionality theory in particular have provided scholars and activists with clear accounts of how civil rights reforms centered in the antidiscrimination principle have failed to sufficiently change conditions for those facing the most violent manifestations of settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and xenophobia. These interventions have exposed how the discrimination principle’s reliance on individual harm, intentionality, and universalized categories of identity has made it ineffective at eradicating these forms of harm and violence and has obscured the actual operations of systems of meaning and control that produce maldistribution and targeted violence. This essay pushes this line of thinking an additional step to focus on the racialized-gendered distribution schemes that operate at the population level through programs that declare themselves race and gender neutral but are in fact founded on the production and maintenance of...

Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive

Abstract: In 1966, Gene Compton’s eatery in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district was the site of the first recorded incident of transgender resistance to police harassment.1 The Compton Cafeteria riot broke out after police assaulted a drag queen inside the establishment; she responded by throwing coffee at them. This incident sparked an immediate reaction from other gender-variant, gay and lesbian people who frequented the restaurant. Rioters smashed windows, destroyed furniture, and set fire to a car.2 This act of resistance to the state regulation of lived expressions of sex/ gender identity lasted for the entire day, and picketing followed for another week. Those subjugated by norms regulating their sex, gender, sexuality, and occupation (many were sex workers) fought back against the disciplining of their lives. The wellknown Stonewall Riots in New York three years later were also led by trans people, as well as by butch lesbians and drag queens, fighting diligently against the police for the right to transgress sex/gender binaries in public spaces free from discrimination and violence.

Retelling racialized violence, remaking white innocence: The politics of interlocking oppressions in transgender day of remembrance

Abstract: Transgender Day of Remembrance has become a significant political event among those resisting violence against gender-variant persons. Commemorated in more than 250 locations worldwide, this day honors individuals who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. However, by focusing on transphobia as the definitive cause of violence, this ritual potentially obscures the ways in which hierarchies of race, class, and sexuality constitute such acts. Taking the Transgender Day of Remembrance/Remembering Our Dead project as a case study for considering the politics of memorialization, as well as tracing the narrative history of the Fred F. C. Martinez murder case in Colorado, the author argues that deracialized accounts of violence produce seemingly innocent White witnesses who can consume these spectacles of domination without confronting their own complicity in such acts. The author suggests that remembrance practices require critical rethinking if we are to confront violence in more effective ways.

The Nonprofit Industrial Complex and Trans Resistance

Abstract: Transpolitics are gaining visibility and momentum, and increasingly trans activists are forming projects and organizations focused on promoting political change. Given this context, this article examines how critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex might be incorporated into trans political analysis and how they could inform this moment of trans political institutionalization. Taking tools and lessons from antiracist and feminist scholars and activists and recognizing the widespread critique of the neoliberal co-optation of the gay and lesbian rights movement, this article highlights alternatives to traditional nonprofit structures. The authors provide an in-depth look at one trans legal organization that operates with a collective governance model and centralizes the leadership of trans people of color, offering it as a potential model for emerging trans organizations.