Politicising Queer Issues and Activism: Disciplinarity, Biopolitics and the Means by which Activist Issues Enter the Public Sphere

Abstract

This paper explores ways of understanding how an activist 'issue' is politicised by examining and analysing lesbian/gay and queer community politics. The paper focuses on the contrast between (1) the wyas in which queer political activism has taken up and politicised the issue of same-sex marriage rights as one of seeking equality and foregrounded as the queer issue of the 2000s; and (2) the issue of queer youth suicide and self-harm which is arguably one of the most under-represented yet ethically most urgent issues within GLBT discourse carrying greater risk and impact on the most marginal and least visible of groups that might ordinarily fall under the banner of queer representation. Why some issues and not others are offered by activist organisations for public sphere consideration, legislative change, executive intervention, and research and community funding is examined through two framework: (1) the shifts and developments in the hsitory of queer political activism over the past forty years; and (2) by working these concerns through an understanding of community activist organisations as disciplinary institutions that work variously alongside or in contrast to broader state, social and national governance systems that deploy biopolitical regulation. For the latter, the argument draws on the recent interest emerging from the release of Foucault's lectures on biopolitics as a mechanism of power and develops these to explore how 'local' disciplinary technologies of power work within, against or alongside 'global' biopolitical frameworks, and the ways in which this relationship frames decisions around what issues are 'important' for a community.