After Equality

LGBT Activism in Argentina and South Africa

Julie Moreau

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009592970
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

After Equality tackles one of the biggest challenges facing LGBT activists in many parts of the world: how to move beyond inclusive legislation to ensure LGBT people can exercise their newly acquired rights. Drawing from in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation with two lesbian organizations in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Cape Town, South Africa, Julie Moreau explores the ways that organizations use identity to make rights useful. Engaging interdisciplinary scholarship and intersectional theory, Moreau develops a novel approach to identity strategizing that explains how activists engage multiple identities to challenge the relationships between identity categories and address the ways interlocking systems of power affect their constituents. By analyzing sexual identity as always constructed through race, class and gender, the book transforms how scholars understand the role of identity in the strategic repertoires of social movement organizations and illuminates dimensions of identity politics that surface in the aftermath of legal inclusion.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Intersectionality and the Strategic Use of Identity in Social Movements
• 2 Identity in Context: Situating Lesbian Activism in Argentina and South Africa
• 3 Making Identity Work: Comparing Identity Strategies of Commensurability and Visibility
• 4 Dilemmas of Success: Identity Strategies and State Engagement
• 5 In the Flesh: Embodying Rights in the Public Sphere
• 6 Intersectionality, Identity Strategizing, and the Future of LGBT Inclusion
• Appendix: Methodological Choices
• References
• Index