I have identified as queer for around two years now and transgender for over a year and a half; as soon as I got into Berkeley, I knew I would be an LGBT studies minor. I took this class initially for that requirement, but also because I wanted to find my space and feel out the differences between the Berkeley queer community and the San Diego queer community, where I had found my niche before college. Before I took this class, I was already something of a radical. I had participated in several protests for transgender rights. The portion of the San Diego community I found my home in was with other radical trans activists. We were not the most popular among the rest of the LGBT community in the city, nor did we expect to be: our goal was to …show more content…
He defines neoliberalism as “a system that positions the market as the answer to everything” and as a general shift from public services to private market (McRuer 2011). This form of politics assumes that a capitalistic market is irrevocably good and sensible and that market deregulation is the answer to everything while promoting institutions such as marriage and military. For queer people, this leads to a mainstream LGBT focus on market, family, and military-based inclusion rather than ending issues facing queer people of color or queer people living in poverty or transgender people or any queer people who do not want to join these normative institutions. Disabled people are also excluded from these institutions, but it is a different form of exclusion, an exclusion based on the idea that disabled people are not capable of contributing to capitalism and therefore are not truly people within American society. Neoliberalism tends to lead to anti-poverty type measures that supposedly focus on the “causes” of poverty without acknowledging that, without capitalism, there would be no poverty. Both disabled and queer people are more likely to live in poverty, but this does not mean that disability or queerness cause poverty. Only capitalism, neoliberalism, and the globalization of these values have that power. Ruer …show more content…
Reproductive justice also becomes a movement beyond simply abortion rights; it extends to the right to have children regardless of socioeconomic status or identity. The neoliberal version of reproductive justice focuses on family planning and preventing “unwanted” pregnancies or any pregnancies until the parents are “ready,” which is usually code for financially stable, holding steady jobs, and healthy. For many, meeting any or all these conditions is impossible; therefore, the queer form of the reproductive justice movement encourages free and accessible contraceptives and abortions for those who do not want children and reproductive assistance and prenatal care for anyone who wants a child. Beyond what Yeung explicitly mentions, this queer reproductive justice movement is anti-eugenicist and avoids selective abortion based on disability, gender, race, or any other single, non life-threatening factor that could be screened