It made for a great photograph. Icons of the feminist movement, stars of women's sport, and amateur athletes joined in a show of solidarity, rallied around the torch that would inaugurate the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston, Texas (Figure 1). It was the first federally funded meeting of its kind, and 20,000 people cheered the arrival of the flame and the illustrious if motley crew that bore it aloft. The moment was, according to the official proceedings, “one of the most dramatic features of the Conference.”

Industry-funded religious liberty legal groups have sought to undermine healthcare policy and law while simultaneously attacking the rights of sexual and gender minorities. Whereas past scholarship has tracked religiously-affiliated healthcare providers’ growing political power and attendant transformations to legal doctrine, our account emphasizes the political donors and visionaries who have leveraged religious providers and the U.S. healthcare system’s delegated structure to transform social policy and bureaucratic agencies more generally.

This article uses Philadelphia Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR) as a case study to examine the intertwining of the feminist movement against sexual violence and state crime control agencies during the 1970s “war on crime.” Law Enforcement Assistant Administration (LEAA) officials expected the anti-rape organizers they subsidized to promote police reporting to the victims they served. This sharply contracted the terrain of feminist anti-rape activism, particularly for women of color who declined police reporting. Lynn Moncrief, a self-described “Black radical feminist” hired by Philadelphia WOAR using LEAA funds, rejected the mandate to increase police reporting rates. Instead, she devoted her energies to remaking WOAR's praxis with Black women and girls at the center. While LEAA funding tethered the anti-rape movement to the rapidly expanding carceral state of the late twentieth century, the example of Lynn Moncrief and the Third World Caucus of Philadelphia WOAR shows that cooptation was never total.

Queer Career opens with a reflection on work's contradictions. While jobs impose discipline and mandate conformity, workers also hope to find fulfillment and express their individuality while on the clock. Labor force segmentation mirrors social disparities, but workplaces are also sites where diverse people converge and collaborate. The tensions in this abstracted meditation—between exploitation and authenticity, between domination and subjectivity—ground the book's historical analysis and shape the tools Margot Canaday brings to the job. There is much to say about Queer Career's interventions as a history of gender, sexuality, law, and social movements. Still, its most revelatory innovations are as a model of what Canaday terms “an affective labor history” (19).

Through oral histories read in tandem with previously untapped archival sources, Margot Canaday's Queer Career unearths an entirely new body of evidence that captures the workplace experiences of a generation of gay and lesbian Americans whose stories have never been told. Canaday does so while making crucial interventions in sociolegal history, the history of gender and sexuality, and the history of capitalism, intertwining those often-siloed genres in innovative and generative ways. My aim here is to highlight just a few of Queer Career's many contributions to the legal history of sex, gender, and sexuality and to the history of social movements and antidiscrimination law.

This article explores the speculative short stories of Egyptian writers Alifa Rifaat (Alīfah Rifaʿat, 1930–1996) and Mansoura Ez-Eldin (Mansūrah ʿIzz al-Dīn, b. 1976) in conversation with scholarship from the anthropology of Islam, Islamic feminism, and queer theory. Rifaat’s 1974 “ʿĀlamī al-Majhūl” (“My World of the Unknown”) and Ez-Eldin’s 2010 “Jinniyyāt al-Nīl” (“Faeries of the Nile”) both stage queer encounters between women and jinn (sentient spirit-beings within Islamic cosmology) who provide spiritual actualization as well as sexual fulfillment. I argue that their emphasis on sensuous forms of piety—largely through Sufi mystical philosophy and poetic imagery—models a queer ethics of being and knowing. Addressing the polarized critical receptions of Rifaat and Ez-Eldin among both the Arabic literary establishment and Anglophone reading publics, the article further exposes the secular sensibilities of the “world republic of letters,” in which feminist and queer modes of reading are often uncoupled from spiritual, and particularly Muslim, epistemes.

It is truly a pleasure and an honor to have my work read by five such esteemed colleagues, and I want to begin by thanking all of them for the thoughtfulness and care of their essays, and also to express my gratitude to Darren Dochuk for organizing this exchange. After working in (pandemic-exacerbated) isolation for so long, it is fascinating for me to see the book through others’ eyes, to appreciate what has resonated, and to grapple with questions and qualms as well.

Early on in her often moving new book, Queer Career, Margot Canaday quotes from an oral history interview she conducted in New York in 2012, at the very beginning of her research. The participant, an African American gay man, recalled his entry into the working world: “I was a typist, and I wanted to type.” The sentence provides early evidence for one of the major findings of the book, that before gay liberation, many queer and trans people chose lower-paying jobs in office and service work because it allowed for greater flexibility to pursue a sexual and social life outside of their job, and because there was less to lose if you were arrested. But Canaday also slows down to parse not just the speaker's words but also his intonation. As Canaday recalls, “[H]e didn't just state this; he joyfully exclaimed it: ‘I was a typist,’ his voice rose, ‘and I wanted to type!’” (19).

Despite a number of excellent queer labor histories, the historiography of lesbian, gay, and trans people and the historiography of work and workers have remained relatively uninfluenced by each other. This is puzzling in some obvious ways: the Mattachine Society was founded by a communist, and class questions were right there at the origin of the field of queer history with John D'Emilio, Leslie Feinberg, Joanne Meyerowitz, and George Chauncey. D'Emilio and Feinberg were Marxists and Meyerowitz began as a labor historian, while Chauncey had the legendary historian of work David Montgomery for one of his advisors. Enumerating his graduate cohort in the acknowledgments of Gay New York, Chauncey names a string of Montgomery's advisees, now eminent labor historians, followed on the next page by Edward and Dorothy Thompson, with whom Chauncey spent a postdoctoral year at Rutgers. More substantively, a central analytic move of Gay New York, itself building on and developing D'Emilio's classic intervention, is to understand the urban gay world in much the same way that, say, Herbert Gutman understood the worlds of working-class immigrants (with which gay social worlds overlapped to a great degree): as a “counterpublic,” although Gutman would not have used the term.

In May 1990, in the first case of its kind, the National Gay Rights Advocates (NGRA) secured a California court judgment prohibiting an insurance company from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. Great Republic Insurance Company had been using a supplemental questionnaire to screen out “occupations that do not require physical exertion … such as florists, interior decorators, and fashion designers,” as well as to use applicants’ marital status, “living arrangements,” and medical history to assess the likely risk of their exposure to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) when denying health care coverage.1 That same year, Moblization for Youth (MFY) Legal Services in New York filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of women living with HIV who had been denied access to Social Security benefits because the government did not recognize their HIV-related conditions as qualifying for state health care coverage under the Medicaid program.2 In one sense, the cases were starkly different: one sought to protect the privately insured from discriminatory scrutiny on the basis of their sexuality while the other attempted to bring a protected class of people into public view to make a claim to health care. Yet both reveal an important truth about the concept of rights in an American context. The structure of the U.S. health care system, one based on private insurance for most and a threadbare, convoluted system of categorical assistance and public insurance for children, the disabled, and the elderly, has shaped Americans’ experience of their own sexuality and bodily autonomy in ways arguably unique to the United States. The public/private hybrid in health care has dramatically curtailed the capacity of those outside the heteronormative family structure to realize their demands for full equality in the wake of the rights revolutions. Efforts to secure a right to sexual or gender identity have foundered on the rocks of the health care system when faced, for example, with a public health crisis like HIV or a lack of health insurance plans willing to fund gender-affirming health care.

This article argues that the tokenistic appropriation of categories such as gender and race have deprived them of their radical and transformative political and practical roots while facilitating their commodification as a luxury product that is consumed by the depoliticized and privileged. Such (ab)use of gender, as an analytical tool, similar to race and class, has been on the rise within progressive circles. However, with the rise of alt-right populism claiming to know and fight ‘feminism’, as well as the commodification of feminism by progressives, now more than ever a decolonial social reproductive theory is needed to help understand and delineate how women are oppressed in a plethora of intersectional ways based on race, class and ability among other traits, while engaging the specific material historical-constitutive structures, judicial-political and socio-economic dimensions of the world order, as well as the emergence of right-wing populism as white heteronormative backlash. This article argues for a feminist decolonial social reproductive theory that sees gender and racial hierarchy as part of capital’s dynamism (a product), which transforms the natural, social and material world, restructuring and evolving for the ordered extraction of surplus. Although this process may differ temporally and geographically, it nonetheless results in a constellation of class exploitation, governance and struggle that facilitates right-wing backlash and undermines the left’s response, thus obviating the need for decolonial social reproductive theory.

In 1974, Congresswoman Bella Abzug introduced the Equality Act, the first federal gay rights legislation. A high-profile ally, Abzug occupied a unique space in the gay rights movement, and the Equality Act cemented her as the premier political intermediary for gay rights. Owing to her prominence, Abzug attracted a geographically and ideologically diverse constituency of gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans. Gay activists as well as isolated individuals reached out to Abzug as a conduit for their grievances and political hopes, and her support unified gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans around a national focal point at a time when the movement was fractured and regional. In the period after Stonewall, Abzug was gay liberation's most meaningful national intermediary. Routinely undervalued in the history of the gay rights movement, Abzug's legislative advocacy reveals the centrality of political allyship within the struggle for equality.

Beef creates an emotional resonance that far outstrips its place within the market. In the 2000s, chicken may have dethroned beef as the most common meat on American plates, ending its reign since the 1940s, but most people do not seem to associate chicken breasts or poultry farmers with national identity the way Americans see ribeyes and cowboys as symbols of the nation's muscular, frontier past.

In the late twentieth century, the American prison system expanded in ways that denied women, and especially working-class and women of color, adequate medical care with regard to HIV-AIDS and their reproductive, chronic, and other illnesses. The experience of living within a racist, misogynistic, and privatized prison system shaped women's organizing on the inside, inspiring forms of mutual aid among prisoners and compelling the formation of inside–outside alliances. Activists not only addressed HIV-AIDS, but also the absence of all the healthcare that incarcerated women failed to receive. Their efforts highlight the systemic and cyclical problems diverse groups of women have faced within the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the United States, as well as women's interpersonal, organizational, and legal efforts to overcome them.