Description
Queer feminist organizing has played a significant role in women’s peacebuilding work, including in anti-war and abolitionist organizing. Yet queer identities as a part of their organizing are continually marginalized in the histories of the women’s peacebuilding movement, and feminist strategies for resisting patriarchal violence. Some of the challenges that lead to this erasure include lack of data collection about individuals in the LGBTQ community, limited resources for researching marginalized populations and institutional homophobia. By engaging with resources in the Human Sexuality Collection, we can begin to answer some of these questions through the personal records of lesbians involved in organizing, as well as through some of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that may have been engaged in peace and justice work not often viewed central to the peacebuilding movement. The Queers for Economic Justice illustrates the importance of the groundbreaking intersectional practices of this NGO, and the groups approach to addressing economic injustice through a queer lens. Bringing a feminist curiosity to my research practice allows me to think about value of these stories of queer peace activists and queers fighting for economic justice as important to ongoing efforts to address gendered harms in global conflict, through non-violent resistance.
