Weiss, Margot Danielle

Preliminary abstract: 'Visions of Sexual Justice' investigates the national context of conflicting visions of the political good among LGBT/queer activists within and outside the United States. Working with a range of LGBT/queer activists from mainstream liberal to left/anarchist-queer, I ask: what are the relationships between different visions of sexual justice and broader conceptions of social justice? I use a multi-sited, comparative ethnographic method, featuring a local comparison of different activist organizations in New York City; a regional comparison of these New York City organizations with those in Chicago and the Twin Cities, as well as those in non-urban Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan; and a transnational comparison of these organizations in the United States with organizations in Toronto, Canada and international queer activist networks (online and off-). With this method, I empirically examine diverse LGBT/queer visions of sexual justice in order to shed light on the ways local and regional visions reflect and refract, connect to and critique, national political frameworks. In this way, the project both situates LGBT/queer activist projects within a broader North American political culture and uses LGBT/queer activism as a case study to explore changing national and transnational political constructions of citizenship, equality, rights, and freedom.