Urvashi Vaid—A Feminist and Anti-Capitalist Icon
By Professor Susan P. Curnan
In my Heller course, Pride, Prejudice, and Policy in the LGBTQ Movement, I draw heavily on Urvashi Vaid's three books, many speeches, critical thought leadership, and her extraordinary social change and social justice activism over 40 years.
With Vaid's passing we have lost an intellectual powerhouse of, and for, our movement, pushing us to move beyond seeking equality for the LGBTQ community in a system built on control and repression, to embracing a feminist and anti-capitalist framework to address inequities across race, gender and class altogether. As a proud lesbian, feminist, woman of color, she taught us about intersectionality long before the theory was popularized in Heller classrooms. She lived it and knew its value and challenges intimately. Indeed in her book “Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics”, she wrote: “For me, an irresistible revolution is one in which the LGBT movement deploys the power it has gained to challenge and change traditions of ignorance, violence, poverty, and authoritarian control that continue to dominate the world. This moment calls for a renewed progressive and feminist politics defined not by narrowing but by expansion. It calls on us to answer the question posed by the Indian gay advocate and lawyer, Arvind Narrian: ‘Is the imagination of queer politics merely about access to rights for queer citizens or also about questioning the structures which limit the very potential of human freedom?’”
Eve Ensler calls “Irresistible Revolution” a “brave reckoning……[full of] potent and invigorating-writings that call us to our most radical and truthful selves.” Angela Davis says Vaid’s book “reveals her capacity for audacious critical analysis, her attention to creative political strategies, and her principled commitment to forge a complex unity out of the major struggles of our time.”
Like I said, an intellectual powerhouse. We will miss her, and we will stand on her shoulders as we seek the next generation of expanded LGBTQ justice.
The link below offers a beautiful tribute by writers at NPR.
Remembering Urvashi Vaid, an LGBTQ activist who spent decades fighting for equality
