CHICAGO: Longtime LGBT rights advocate Urvashi Vaid will be in Chicago Wed., April 3 for a free event at the Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted. She will discuss and sign copies of her new book, Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class, and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics. This is her only public program in Chicago.
The event will start at 7 p.m. and is co-hosted by Center on Halsted, the Community Media Workshop; Ellen Stone Belic Institute for Women & Gender in Arts & Media, Columbia College Chicago; and Windy City Times newspaper. Women & Children First Bookstore will have books for sale at the event.
Comic and activist Kate Clinton, Vaid's longtime partner, will also be at the event, leading a Q&A with the author.
From one of the nation's best-known social justice leaders and community activists comes a strategic and informed argument about the pitfalls of limited political vision, and the benefits of an agenda that encompasses, yet moves beyond, equality.
The LGBT movement is on one of the most active, contested, and engaging social movements in the world. This optimistic book challenges advocates for LGBT rights in the U.S. to aspire beyond the narrow framework of equality. It outlines a more substantive politics with race, class, and gender at its foundation, and suggests that such a politics will produce greater and more meaningful change for a larger number of people.
Irresistible Revolution is intended for a broad and general audience. The book turns an experienced and thoughtful lens onto many common controversies, rhetoric, and strategic questions that face contemporary social change movements: pursuit of broad or narrow agendas, integration of economic and racial justice, integrating sexual orientation and gender identity in human rights frameworks, the persistence of sexism, the dilemmas of bipartisanship, and the challenge of seeing beyond the short term to secure gains made for the long run.
RSVP: To make a reservation, contact Tom Elliott at telliott@centeronhalsted.org or 773-472-6469
BOOKS: To purchase and/or reserve your copies call Women & Children First Bookstore at 773-769-9299 or visit www.womenandchildrenfirst.com . Guests are encouraged to reserve copies or prepay to ensure an adequate number of books. Reserved copies and a limited number of additional copies will be available at the event.
For more information, please contact the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women & Gender in the Arts & Media, Columbia College Chicago at 312-369-8829.
About the Author: Urvashi Vaid is a community organizer and attorney who has been a leader in the LGBT and social justice movement for thirty years. Currently the Director of the Engaging Tradition Project at Columbia Law School's Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, Vaid is a former staff attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project, and a former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. She lives in New York City with her partner of 25 years, the humorist Kate Clinton.
Advance Praise
"Irresistible Revolution is a brave reckoning. Potent and invigorating—writings that call us to our most radical and truthful selves. Writings that call us to reclaim rights, freedoms, and expressions sacrificed in the need to belong. Writings that remind us that freedom does not come through narrowing our concerns but through the expansion of them."
—
—Eve Ensler, playwright and activist—
"Urvashi Vaid brings her three decades of experience pushing for gender, racial, and economic justice in gay and lesbian politics in this new book. She applies herself to some of most urgent dilemmas facing today's queer activists: cooptation, the limits of 'marriage equality' demands, and the relationship of LGBT people to U.S. military imperialism. In these honest, readable, provocative essays, Vaid lets us in on her self-described 'ambivalence' about the LGBT movement, providing an excellent set of entry points into the most urgent questions facing LGBT activists today."
—
—Dean Spade, author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law—
"There's no one like Urvashi Vaid: no heart more fierce for justice, no mind more insatiable for the truth, no conscience more rigorous, no spirit more indefatigable and invincibly democratic, no voice I've ever heard more decent, generous, strong, honest, and delightful. Irresistible Revolution gives us a perfect portrait of a truly indispensable woman."
—Tony Kushner—
MAGNUS BOOKS
September 2012
Cloth, $21.95, 238 pages, 5" x 8"
ISBN: 978-1-936833-29-0
www.magnusbooks.com
