"Hasten the Revolution!": Coalition-Building, Resistance, and Temporality in Leslie Feinberg's Fiction

Abstract

abstract:This article revisits Leslie Feinberg's pioneering Stone Butch Blues alongside hir lesser known second novel, Drag King Dreams. Through a prism of well-established queer theory and emerging trans scholarship, the author seeks to demonstrate how Feinberg's political vision retained its Marxist core while adapting with the times to confront new challenges presented by neoliberism, bio/necropolitics, and imperialist warfare. Living from the mid-twentieth century to the dawn of the twenty-first, Feinberg's life spanned from an era of industrial capitalism to the apotheosis of neoliberalism. Witnessing everything from pre-Stonewall queer culture to Gay Liberation and, eventually, homonormativity, Feinberg's political commitments remained remarkably consistent. Hir life and work were anchored by a critical class consciousnesses that, in a queer vein, destabilized identity in the formation of coalitional political work and, through a transgender/Marxist line of thought, rejected binary modes of gender altogether as coercive mechanisms of capitalism. Feinberg's project is thus at once historical, yet ever contemporary, and merits renewed attention and commitment in the twenty-first century.