Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Irresistible Revolution is a brave reckoning. Potent and invigoratin --writings that call us to our most radical and truthful selves. Writings that call us to reclaim rights, freedoms, and expressions sacrificed in the need to belong. Writings that remind us that freedom does not come through narrowing our concerns but through the expansion of them."
Eve Ensler, playwright and activist
Review
Irresistible Revolution is more than a collection of revivifying, incisive, provocative, scrupulously argued, and beautifully articulated speeches and essays. It's more than a fantastically useful roadmap through the convulsive politics of these perilous times, more than the fearless analytical acumen and the clear-eyed, mature, impassioned perspectives available on every page. People in the LGBT community, people everywhere who are struggling to assimilate this eras unnerving contiguity of hope and despair will find whats written here indispensable.”
Tony Kushner, playwright
"Urvashi Vaids extraordinary collection of essays on the movement for LGBT rights reveals her capacity for audacious critical analysis, her attention to creative political strategies and her principled commitment to forge a complex unity out of the major struggles of our time. Most importantly, she urges us to embrace feminist and anti-capitalist frameworks that link campaigns against homophobia to radical movements against racism, xenophobia and war."
Angela Y. Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz
"Irresistible Revolution is a brave reckoning. Potent and invigoratingwritings that call us to our most radical and truthful selves. Writings that call us to reclaim rights, freedoms, and expressions sacrificed in the need to belong. Writings that remind us that freedom does not come through narrowing our concerns but through the expansion of them."
Eve Ensler, playwright and activist
"Urvashi Vaid brings her three decades of experience pushing for gender, racial, and economic justice in gay and lesbian politics in this new book. She applies herself to some of most urgent dilemmas facing today's queer activists: cooptation, the limits of marriage equality demands, and the relationship of LGBT people to U.S. military imperialism. In these honest, readable, provocative essays, Vaid lets us in on her self-described ambivalence about the LGBT movement, providing an excellent set of entry points into the most urgent questions facing LGBT activists today."
Dean Spade, author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law
Synopsis
The LGBT movement is on one of the most active, contested and engaging social movements in the US. This optimistic book challenges advocates for LGBT rights to aspire beyond the narrow framework of equality to a more expansive and inclusive politics. The books essays examine the dilemmas of compromise, assimilation, and ideology that face advocates for LGBT rights through accessible, provocative, and personal perspectives derived from the authors experience as a leader in this movement. Intended for a broad and general audience, the book turns a thoughtful lens into the controversies, rhetoric, and strategic questions that face this social revolution still in progress.
Synopsis
From one of the nation's best-known social justice leaders and community activists comes a strategic and informed argument about the pitfalls of limited political vision, and the benefits of an agenda that encompasses, yet moves beyond, equality.
The LGBT movement is on one of the most active, contested, and engaging social movements in the world. This optimistic book challenges advocates for LGBT rights in the U.S. to aspire beyond the narrow framework of equality. It outlines a more substantive politics with race, class, and gender at its foundation, and suggests that such a politics will produce greater and more meaningful change for a larger number of people.
Irresistible Revolution is intended for a broad and general audience. The book turns an experienced and thoughtful lens onto many common controversies, rhetoric, and strategic questions that face contemporary social change movements: pursuit of broad or narrow agendas, integration of economic and racial justice, integrating sexual orientation and gender identity in human rights frameworks, the persistence of sexism, the dilemmas of bipartisanship, and the challenge of seeing beyond the short term to secure gains made for the long run.
About the Author
Urvashi Vaid is a community organizer and attorney who has been a leader in the LGBT and social jUrvashi Vaid is an experienced leader with a 30 year track record of innovation and achievement inside and beyond the LGBT movement. Currently the Director of the Engaging Tradition Project at Columbia Law School at Columbia University, where she leads a multi-disciplinary project to examine the ways that notions of tradition affect and influence gender and sexual justice movements, Vaid was a Visiting Senior Fellow with the Department of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2010-2011.
She served as the executive director of the Arcus Foundation from 2005-2010; was formerly deputy director of the Governance and Civil Society Unit of the Ford Foundation, where she worked from 2001-2005; and held several leadership roles at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) from 1986-1993 and 1997-2000, including media director, executive director and director of its think tank. She was a staff attorney for the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where she initiated the organizations work on HIV/AIDS in prisons.
Vaid is author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (Anchor, 1996) and co-editing, with Dr. John DEmilio and Dr. William Turner, a ground-breaking anthology on public policy history Creating Change: Public Policy, Sexuality and Civil Rights (St. Martin's Press, 2000). She was a columnist for The Advocate, the U.S. national gay and lesbian newsmagazine, and has contributed chapters to a number of books.
Vaid is a graduate of Vassar College, and of Northeastern University School of Law. She lives in New York City with her partner of 24 years, the comedian, Kate Clinton.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction
Imagining beyond Equality
Still Aint Satisfied The limits of LGBT Equality
Top 10 Things for Progressive LGBT Activists to Remember
A Deeper Love: Family Politics
Imagining Beyond Racism
What Can Brown Do For You: Race Sexuality and the Future of LGBT Politics
Why Affirmative Action on Race and Gender is Linked to LGBT Liberation
Imagining Beyond Sexism
Race, Sex and Power
Defining the Boundaries of Lesbian Identity
Mapping The Future of Choice
Imagining Beyond The Wedding Ring
Beyond the Wedding Ring: LGBT Activism in the Age of Obama
What Faces the LGBT Workplace Movement today?
The Enemies of Love
The Right is Wrong