Rights-Making and Rights-Taking: A Module on Stonewall and Intersectionality

This semester, my department has tasked me with offering our H100: Introduction to History course. There is not a fixed curriculum for this course, so faculty can develop this course in any way they want. I decided that my course would use the 20th-century history of anticolonialism, the US Civil Rights Movements, and the LGBTQ+ Rights Movements as a framework for teaching students about the nature of historical thinking, methods, and practice.

I chose these three movements, because there are important overlaps and intersections as well as a lot of thematic complementarities (and, of course, it would give us plenty of opportunity to focus on James Baldwin!).

Obviously, the concept of rights is a key theme with which we have to grapple. This presented a problem for me. How could I get them to engage with the very abstract and complex notions of rights without it overwhelming the students and swallowing up course time?

My first impulse was to give them a full history of modern concepts of rights. As a scholar of the 18th century, I was strongly compelled to pursue this route, walking them through constitutional theory, the origin of human rights, universal declarations, and the critique of universalism. I ultimately decided that this was not feasible. There was no way that this was going to fly in a 100-level course full of non majors.

My second impulse was to offer a summary of philosophical frameworks for rights theories. But was I seriously expecting my students to work through the basics of moral philosophy and deontological ethics?

I even came up with a third idea. Maybe I would start with the idea of environmental personhood and discuss Te Urewera or Te Awa Tupua. We could discuss what environmental personhood and rights meant in the contemporary context and how it challenged their assumptions about rights. No. Best to save that for my course on the Anthropocene.

In the end, I decided to frame rights in the context of "rights-making" and "rights-taking." By "rights-making," I asked the students to reflect on the fact that civil, human, constitutional, etc. rights are always made in a historical context. In practice, rights are never constant. They are negotiated, claimed, and fought for. By "rights-taking," I wanted them to think about how, in these historical contexts, rights are taken (i.e. claimed) by activists or taken away by those with power. Rather than working from a history-of or a taxonomical approach to rights, we would focus on rights as an assemblage of ideas, concepts, social relations, symbolic forms, claims, laws, practices, and materialities in motion.

We are about to begin the "rights-making/rights-taking” module, which will consist of an online discussion forum followed up by a virtual group conversation with me. To frame these conversations, I have assigned students two films: Before Stonewall (1984) and Stonewall Uprising (2010). This module comes in the wake of a series of exercises on the practice of history and the construction of historical memory, and I plan to use this module as a way to

1. discuss the ways in which oral histories function as historical documents

2. the ways that both narrative history and historical memory can both amplify and efface historical voices

3. introduce the concept of intersectionality in the history of civil rights.

The framing questions for our online forum are as follows:

• Why do folks often divide the the 20th century history of LGBTQ+ Rights into "Before Stonewall" and "After Stonewall"?

• What other ways of framing the history of LGBTQ+ Rights might be possible?

• What does the history of LGBTQ+ Rights tell us about "rights-making" and "rights-taking" in the 20th-century US?

• Who are Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Stormé DeLarverie, Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and Kiyoshi Kuromiya (use and cite documents in the IUPUI Library collections)? What does their absence in the documentaries tell you about how history and historical memory are constructed? What does it tell you about “rights-making” and “rights-taking”?

• Using the various historical digitized newspaper collections at the IUPUI Library and archival databases on LGBTQ history in the IUPUI Library*, how do these sources help us better understand or expand upon the themes of the films (please cite and link to your sources, so others can visit these pages). Feel free to look up an event that you saw portrayed in the documentary or find other examples from the archive.

  * Archives of Sexuality and Gender
  GenderWatch
  LGBT Thought and Culture