Pride Picks 2025

From Ramallah to New York, Tel Aviv to Porto Alegre, people around the world celebrate a formidable, transnational Palestinian LGBTQ social movement. Solidarity with Palestinians has become a salient domain of global queer politics. Yet LGBTQ Palestinians, even as they fight patriarchy and imperialism, are themselves subjected to an "empire of critique" from Israeli and Palestinian institutions, Western academics, journalists and filmmakers, and even fellow activists. Such global criticism has limited growth and led to an emphasis within the movement on anti-imperialism over the struggle against homophobia.

With this book, Sa'ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestinian spirit of agency, defiance, and creativity, in the face of daunting pressures and forces working to constrict it. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique explores the necessity of connecting the struggles for Palestinian freedom with the struggle against homophobia.

The futures of reproductive justice and LGBTQIA+ liberation are intimately connected. Both movements were born out of the desire to love and build families of our choosing—when and how we decide. Both movements are rooted in broader social justice liberationist traditions that center the needs of Black and brown communities, the LGBTQIA+ community, gender-nonconforming folks, femmes, poor folks, parents, and all those who have been forced to the margins of society. Taking as its starting point the idea that we all have the human right to bodily autonomy, to sexual health and pleasure, and to exercise these rights with dignity, Queering Reproductive Justice sets out to re-envision the seemingly disparate strands of the reproductive justice and LGBTQIA+ movements and offer an invitation to reimagine these movements as one integrated vision of freedom for the future.

Candace Bond-Theriault asserts that for reproductive justice to be truly successful, we must acknowledge that members of the LGBTQIA+ community often face distinct, specific, and interlocking oppressions when it comes to these rights. Family formation, contraception needs, and appropriate support from healthcare services are still poorly understood aspects of the LGBTQIA+ experience, which often challenge mainstream notions of the nuclear family, and the primacy of blood-relatives.

Blending advocacy with a legal, rights-based framework, Queering Reproductive Justice offers a unified path for attaining reproductive justice for LGBTQIA+ people. Drawing on U.S. law and legislative history, healthcare policy, human rights, and interviews with academics and activists, Bond-Theriault presents incisive new recommendations for queer reproductive justice theory, organizing, and advocacy. This book offers readers an invitation to join the conversation, and ultimately to join the movement to that is unapologetically queering reproductive justice.