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In 2014, the movie Pride written by Stephen Beresford and directed by Matthew Warchus brought to the attention of a national and international general public the story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), which had been largely forgotten within the London LGBTQ community itself. LGSM were a solidarity group active in the 1984-85 British miners’ strike. They formed in London a few months into the strike and forged a coalition with the miners based on material support, solidarity, and a shared will to resist the attacks launched by Thatcherism in the 1980s on organized labor as well as black, feminist, and gay and lesbian communities and movements. Pride was released only a few months after Stuart Hall’s passing in February 2014. Hall has been one of the key interpreters of the 1980s in Britain. His work at the time shed light on the conjunctural triangulation between the rise of Thatcherism, the crisis of the left, and the consolidation of ‘identity’ as a terrain of political struggle broken open by intersecting social movements such as feminism, black power, and lesbian and gay liberation. Despite the powerful resonances that exist between the story of LGSM and Hall’s thinking on the renewal of the left in the 1980s, Hall adopted a very skeptical position on the miners' strike and experience of feminist, black, and lesbian and gay support groups for the miners barely appeared in his analyses. In this article, I interrogate this missed encounter between Hall and LGSM.

The Swedish law for gender assignment in certain cases (Lag (1972:119) om fastställande av könstillhörighet i vissa fall) was adopted in 1972 to regulate the gender confirmation treatment and legal sex reassignment of intersex and transsexual persons. This essay aims to illuminate the coproduction between science and society that made the law as well as its accompanying institutions and regulations possible. With queer theory and the performativity of gender as a framework, the analysis focuses on the limits of normality and the handling of abnormally sexed bodies. The conclusion is that while the coproduction was a continuous process where power was produced through knowledge and concentrated in an institution, it also represented a recognition of intersex and transsexual persons that made them more legible than they had been before.

Between F* Words is an affective history of how gay liberationism persisted through its intersections with back-to-the-land movements in the 1970s Southeast. In telling an affective history, I show how liberationism is best understood as more than a reasoned political choice; rather, it crucially involves specific ways of viewing and feeling in an increasingly globalized world. Specifically, its politics complemented critiques of a divisive system with lateral strategies for staying connected. By tracing gay liberationist networks from rural Ozark and Appalachian sites to cities like New Orleans and Atlanta, I prioritize a regional analytic which, unlike models predicated on the urban “gay ghetto,” hinges on rural-urban connection. This project, then, sets gay liberation both within everyday life and in unexpected places as a way to imagine expanded LGBT political cultural maps. Employing analysis of oral history interviews, newly available archival materials, and the print culture of RFD (a rural gay serial published in the Southeast from 1978-2009), Between F* Words is a description of the subject formations of Southeastern gay liberationist collectives who felt the word gay no longer represented their political cultures. Using Felix Guattari’s concept of the refrain, I read the words and images of those in the culture to characterize the orientational, emotional, psychic, and corporeal dimensions of improvised subjectivities like the faggot, sissie, gentle man, and Radical Faerie. At the same time, I show how these regional refrains emerged in contrast to similar West Coast ones. Their Southeastern networks were acutely aware of their proximity to the fomenting Moral Majority which would become a conservative cornerstone of the Reagan-era national political economy. Galvanized by the racism, sexism, and homophobia at the heart of the conservative political culture which they saw taking root in the Jim Crow geography around them, these gay liberationist subjectivi