
QUEER ALLIANCES: HOW POWER SHAPES POLITICAL MOVEMENT FORMATIONS, Erin Mayo Adam. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2020. pp. 240. Paperback $ 26.00. ISBN 978-1-503-61279-2. Hardcopy $85.00. ISBN 978-1-503-61035-4.
Reviewed by Cyril Ghosh, Department of Government and Politics, Wagner College. Email: cyril.ghosh@wagner.edu.
Erin Mayo-Adam’s QUEER ALLIANCES: HOW POWER SHAPES POLITICAL MOVEMENT FORMATIONS is a superbly-researched and vital, addition to the scholarship on law and politics, social movements, legal mobilization theory, immigration, and sexuality and politics. The book also has the additional advantage of actually delivering on what it promises to deliver in its opening pages, which, as one knows well, is not something one can always count on.
Mayo-Adam invites us here to look at that which is away from the limelight. We can learn something, she correctly decides, if we pause for a minute and look at the progressive work that is being done by those who do not appear on our television sets, those who do not get profiled in the NEW YORKER, and those whose names do not appear in case studies we download from the Kennedy School of Government’s website.
In other words, Mayo-Adam wants us to understand both that – and why – our knowledge about social movements is incomplete, and by extension not very sophisticated at all, if we do not take stock of the social justice work that is being done by those who are (to borrow a term from postcolonial theory) the subaltern.
More specifically, Mayo-Adam investigates, using a queer methodology, and while drawing upon interviews and participant-observation, two episodes of coalition-formation and fragmentation in the context of what she refers to as “rights episodes” – Washington’s Referendum 74 campaign for marriage equality and Arizona’s immigrants’ rights campaign against SB 1070 – to discover the factors that contribute toward coalitions forming and fracturing. Each of these episodic movements centers around a specific set of rights demands without inevitably getting reduced to them but also not always being able to successfully achieve or exceed them.
In these rights episodes, we find, on occasion, concrete advances that get codified in the law. We also find,