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Intersectional Coalitions: The Paradoxes of Rights-Based Movement Building in LGBTQ and Immigrant Communities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Erin M. Adam
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Abstract

Over the past decade, inter- and intra-movement coalitions composed of organizations within the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) and immigrant rights movements have formed at the local level. These coalitions speak to a massive organizing effort that has achieved some rights campaign successes. However, coalition unity that culminated in “wins” like marriage equality came at a cost. While both movements expanded and unified, they simultaneously ossified around goals that matter to the most privileged segments of their respective communities. The result is a paradox: coalitions do sometimes form within and across movements, promote enduring unity across seemingly divergent movements, and facilitate rights campaign “wins.” However, coalitions simultaneously reinforce hierarchical exclusions through the continued marginalization of issues that uproot conventional power dynamics, like police violence, economic inequality, and gender justice. This essay argues that the construction of a common “civil rights past” identity within coalitions can help to explain this paradox. The development of this collective identity expands movements, occasionally thwarting the power dynamics responsible for the centering of the interests of the most privileged constituencies within social movements. However, the episodic nature of rights-based campaigns simultaneously contains and undermines the formation of this collective identity, reinforcing movement divisions based on race, gender, and class.

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Articles
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Law & Society Review , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 132 - 167
Copyright
© 2017 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance and encouragement of George Lovell and Michael McCann as well as Chandan Reddy, Rachel Cichowski, Naomi Murakawa, and Dara Strolovitch who provided feedback and support at various stages of this study. The author would also like to thank members of the Comparative Law and Society Studies Center at the University of Washington (UW), especially Heather Evans and Tanya Kawarki who provided feedback on early versions of this essay in a writing group and Katherine Beckett, Steve Herbert, Stephen Meyers, Arzoo Osanloo, and Carolyn Pinedo-Turnovsky whose comments during a workshare helped develop this essay. The author is further grateful for the constructive comments of numerous academic conference attendees and discussants, especially Anna-Maria Marshall, Michael Bosia, Scott Barclay, Shauna Fisher, and Zein Murib, and various anonymous reviewers. The author would also like to thank the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington for the grant funding necessary to complete this study. Finally, and most importantly, the author would like to thank the organization leaders, advocates, community workers, and activists who participated in this study, whose incredible movement-building in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds she is in complete awe of and whose amazing work in the struggle against oppression far surpasses the confines of academic research.

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