122nd PAMLA ConferenceThursday, November 20 - Sunday, November 23, 2025San Francisco, California  |  InterContinental Hotel San Francisco

Considering the white masculine neoliberal realities of the modern “gay rights movement,” Roderick A. Ferguson recalls the “multidimensional roots” of gay liberation in his groundbreaking monograph One Dimensional Queer. He writes that revisionist histories of the gay liberation that position white, cisgender men as the face of the movement elide "the ways in which queer politics were emerging as ways to engage anti-poverty and anti-racism” (Ferguson 44). He contends that the revisionist history of the Stonewall Riots as a movement based on singularity and the “uniformity of queer struggles” required the “disappear[ing] [of] trans and queer of color activisms as linchpins between a variety of political struggles” (44).

Ferguson argues that the origins of the gay liberation movement were multidimensional and worked in solidarity with other civil rights movements, such as anti-racism and anti-capitalism, despite the modern devolution of the movement. The erasure of trans, Black, and brown people, as well as women and especially women of color, afforded gay rights leaders the power of patriarchy and white supremacy to achieve their desired admission into a normative capitalist economy. This strategy not only abandons the most vulnerable populations of the queer community, it reproduces normative iterations of sexual desire in service of white capitalist hegemony.

This panel welcomes any work that speaks to the radical, multi-ethnic roots of queer activism through literary or cultural studies approaches. We are especially interested in queer narratives that center race and ethnicity, and that are invested in broader questions of social justice outside a singular “gay rights” framework. Primary texts from any ethnic or cultural tradition, genre, and era are welcome.

Please submit an abstract through the PAMLA submission system: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19685

Contact Dr. Jamiee Cook (she/her) at jncook@csustan.edu with questions.