After Equality : LGBT Activism in Argentina and South Africa

This book examines how LGBT organizations strategize multiple identities to make legal rights a lived reality. Through in-depth analysis of the work of LGBT organizations in South Africa and Argentina, this book develops a novel theory of identity strategizing that explains how activists engage multiple identities to achieve their goals.

After Equality tackles one of the biggest challenges facing LGBT activists in many parts of the world: how to move beyond inclusive legislation to ensure LGBT people can exercise their newly acquired rights. Drawing from in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation with two lesbian organizations in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Cape Town, South Africa, Julie Moreau explores the ways that organizations use identity to make rights useful. Engaging interdisciplinary scholarship and intersectional theory, Moreau develops a novel approach to identity strategizing that explains how activists engage multiple identities to challenge the relationships between identity categories and address the ways interlocking systems of power affect their constituents. By analyzing sexual identity as always constructed through race, class and gender, the book transforms how scholars understand the role of identity in the strategic repertoires of social movement organizations and illuminates dimensions of identity politics that surface in the aftermath of legal inclusion.