Description
The paper traces the uneasy histories between queer and communism to reconsider what their entanglement might offer for rethinking the international. Queer and communist politics have long occupied uneasy, often antagonistic positions. Communism presents itself as a mass movement oriented toward collective emancipation; queerness, by contrast, is often cast as identitarian and particularistic. One is imagined as plotting the demise of capitalism, the other dismissed as one of its decadent symptoms. Their trajectories reinforce this separation: as communist state projects faltered in the twentieth century, queer rose to prominence with gay liberation and later queer theory. Brief intersections—such as the Bolsheviks’ early decriminalization of homosexuality—quickly dissipated under state repression. Since then, Communism (almost always the authoritarian kind associated with the Soviet Union, China, or Cuba) has been branded an inherently queerphobic project, while the free market is imagined as the guarantor of sexual freedom. One became idiosyncratic, the other quintessentially modern. Communism’s subject of history, often figured as the virile proletarian worker-hero, left little room for gender or sexual difference, a stance condemned by queer revolutionaries alongside the party’s broader moral conservatism. These tensions persist today, as debates over trans liberation within socialist movements echo old suspicions that “identity politics” are 'merely cultural' (Butler, 1997) and fragment class solidarity. The way the history of queer and communism is usually told leaves little room for convergence. Moving beyond these impasses, the paper rethinks both histories in reparative terms. Drawing on examples from the UK, US, and Latin America, it traces moments of queer-communist solidarity and alliance to reconsider their shared horizons of liberation - and what this might mean for the study of the international.
