Recent Events: Recordings to Watch!

Check out these three videos of recent panel events I was part of.

This panel at NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality was a truly interesting conversation. And there was accidental outfit coordination between panelists.

This event at San Francisco State was a showstopper, featuring so many brilliant thinkers talking about queer justice, colonialism, war, and pinkwashing.

I was honored to be the keynote trainer at Movement Law Lab’s final session in their Build Power, Fight Power online course, in which thousands of lawyers and law students participated over several months. In this talk, I provide a basic rundown of the limits of law and lawyers to social movements, and the potential for us to participate in ethical, transformative ways.

Finally, this event with the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project about queer and trans abolition politics is not to be missed!

My Latest Writing on Pinkwashing: The Right Wing Is Leveraging Trans Issues to Promote Militarism

I wrote this article on the dangerous ways the right is using trans people to promote right-wing security and military agendas alongside its violent backlash against trans people. Among these tactics is the Israeli government’s “Brand Israel” campaign developed over a decade ago to promote a positive public image of Israel, foment anti-Muslim racism, and distract from Israel’s  brutal occupation of Palestine and apartheid regime. 

Right Leveraging Trans Issues to Promote Militarism

Excerpt: “[T]he use of a thin LGBT inclusion politics to make the Israeli or US military appear progressive is becoming a losing strategy. Resistance to pinkwashing is rising, and each controversy exposes new communities to the critique of this propaganda. A growing number of Jews in the US, especially young people, are becoming critical of Israel. The Movement for Black Lives has made its solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation clear, helping many people in the US see the connections between US and Israeli racism and state violence. Cross-movement organizing between Indigenous people in North America, including Water Protectors, and Palestine liberation activists is helping people see the links between US and Israel as settler-colonialism.”

Read the full article here.

Resist Pinkwashing in Seattle NOW!

Shockingly, shamefully, on April 5, the Seattle LGBTQ Commission is sponsoring an event organized by the zionist hate group StandWithUs that will feature a discussion with a trans IDF officer. You may recall that in 2012 we had a huge controversy in Seattle about a different StandWithUs and A Wider Bridge sponsored pinkwashing event with the same Commission. Below is the letter I have just sent to the Commissioners, urging them to cancel. I encourage you to write to them. Their email addresses are not publicly posted by you can send correspondence to the City staffer who coordinates the Commission, Erika.Pablo@seattle.gov.
 
 

Continue reading “Resist Pinkwashing in Seattle NOW!”

New Syllabus, Review, Blogpost and Translation

I’m co-teaching a class this semester with Prof. Katherine Franke about the law of occupation and colonialism.  The class looks at the occupation of Palestine, US colonialism in Guam, Puerto Rico, North America, Hawaii and the Marshall Islands, the US occupation of Iraq, and more.  You can see the syllabus here.

I also wanted to share a new review of Normal Life by Ro Velasquez Guzman in Shameless magazine, and a new blogpost I wrote for SRLP’s blog about how recent debates about gun control and mental health relate to trans politics and criminalization.  Finally, HUGE THANKS to Morgan Ztardust for translating “For Lovers and Fighters” in Spanish.  The translation is here.

Blog Post for Upcoming Conference

This coming Friday and Saturday I’m heading to Los Angeles for a conference that marks the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and the 10th anniversary of Lawrence v. Texas.  In advance of the conference, speakers were asked to write blog posts related to the themes of the conference panels we are participating in.  These were posted to the Balkinization blog. I thought I’d re-post what I wrote here as well:

Sexual freedom, legal equality and settler colonialism

In recent weeks, the world has been captivated by the emergence of the Idle No More movement. Indigenous people and their allies in Canada and around the world have been engaging in a wave of protest actions.  These protests, which include marches, vigils, road blocks, railway blocks, flashmobs and the prominent hunger strike of Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat, are raising a number of significant issues.  Initially, the movement was a response to the Harper government’s introduction of Bill C-45, legislation that would significantly weaken environmental protection laws in Canada.  As the movement has grown, its message has broadened to raise questions about indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection more generally, both in Canada and around the world where indigenous people struggle against colonization and environmental degradation.
Movements against colonization raise significant questions for scholars studying the legal regulation of sexuality and family.  The imposition of gender norms and family formation norms and the use of sexual violence as a tool of war have been significant to processes of colonization.  The depiction of cultures and peoples targeted for colonization as “backward” in terms of sexuality and family formation has been a rationalization for colonization, and has often included portraying indigenous women as needing to be saved by the colonizers from their own families and cultures.  These methods and rationalizations are visible in the history of the colonization of North America where the Idle No More movement has been most visible so far, but we can also hear these rationales deployed to justify the war in Afghanistan, proposed war with Iran, and in rationales for Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine.
These dynamics are particularly interesting in the context of a contemporary gay and lesbian rights framework in the US and its global influence.  As many scholars have noted, the gay and lesbian rights framework has increasingly moved toward demands for formal legal equality in recent decades, particularly focusing on demands for military participation and access to legal marriage. There has been a great deal of critique of these demands by a range of feminist, anti-racist, queer and trans scholars.  One aspect of this critique that is particularly interesting in the context of the Idle No More movement’s growing momentum is how these demands speak or fail to speak to the quest for sexual freedom for those imagining freedom from an anti-colonial perspective.
Ostensibly, the contemporary gay and lesbian rights agenda developed from the sexual liberation movements of the 1960’s and ‘70’s that are remembered in images from the Stonewall Riots where queer and trans people fought back against police harassment and criminalization.  As it developed, its vision of “freedom” has become more aligned with joining the apparatuses of colonial occupation than fighting them. The US military literally operationalizes US colonial and imperial violence, and marriage enforces the family formation norms for the settler colonial state by disbursing essential benefits to the population based on whether we conform to that norm.  As the Idle No More movement and other anti-colonial movements such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement continue to grow, queer and trans politics faces interesting questions about how various approaches to conceptualizing sexual freedom relate to anti-colonial agendas that seek to dismantle the apparatuses in which certain lesbian and gay rights campaigns and court cases seek gay and lesbian inclusion. These questions are particularly interesting now, as gay and lesbian people are increasingly articulated as those that need saving in colonial discourses.  Access to legal marriage and military participation for gays and lesbians are now often used as measuring sticks for whether or not a country respects human rights, and human rights enforcement rationalizations are a popular justification for military intervention.  The Idle No More movement’s emergence in this moment provides an opportunity for reflection on the relationship between commitments to sexual freedom and commitments to self-determination and decolonization.

New Videos and a New Syllabus

I am teaching a January Term class at Seattle U for the first time, starting in a few weeks.  It will be a four day intensive about imprisonment.  I just posted the syllabus in case it is of interest.

I also wanted to share some new videos.  GritTV recently posted an interview that Laura Flanders did with me.

http://blip.tv/grittv/dean-spade-the-most-imprisoning-nation-in-the-world-part-1-of-2-6482091

Also, I recently attended the World Social Forum: Free Palestine! in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I was part of a Queer Visions contingent that put on two public panels, this one and this one. Here’s the talk I gave about marriage and the military and pinkwashing: