PI: Layla E. Picard, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Virginia
Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,346, Warren E. Miller Fund in Electoral Politics
Project Abstract: The United States of America is home to more firearms than people. While many gun owners keep pistols and rifles purely for recreational purposes, Americans also use guns as tools of political action. Social scientists have described some of the ways that Americans bear arms for political purposes, but these accounts tend to attribute practices to particular cultural or ideological positions. For example, scholars have shown that straight white conservative men bear arms in ways that reinforce the political status quo, which privileges people like them. But aside from research on violent revolutionary movements, we know very little about how minoritized and marginalized groups use arms in their political efforts, or how bearing arms changes the person who bears them and their politics. Even more importantly, we lack a normative framework for the role that arms ought to play in political life. My dissertation focuses on the practices and discourses of armed queer activists involved in radical leftist political projects. I explicate the meanings and values that queer radicals associate with arms, and the actual practices of bearing arms in which they participate, in order to provide a descriptive theory of subaltern militancy. I also draw upon the examples provided by queer militants to develop a normative argument about whether and under what conditions arms may play a positive and beneficial role in liberatory politics.