Beyond “Resistance”: Queer Anti-Imperialism, State Repression, and the Afterlives of Revolution

Beyond “Resistance”: Queer Anti-Imperialism, State Repression, and the Afterlives of Revolution What do we mean when we invoke “resistance”? Is it an attitude of dissent, a cultural critique, or an individual act of refusal? Or does resistance name something more concrete: organized struggle emerging from structured conflicts over power, governance, and material life? This panel takes that question seriously. Rather than treating resistance as a diffuse posture of opposition, we examine movements formed within direct confrontations with state repression, imperial war, racialized policing, imprisonment, and economic restructuring. Across different geographies and historical moments, we ask how power operates—and how collective struggle takes shape in response. Bob Lederer (co-producer of Out-FM at WBAI/Pacifica and longtime anti-racist LGBTQ+ activist) traces U.S. political repression against anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements in the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on decades of organizing and archival research, he examines the use of grand juries, surveillance, prosecutorial pressure, and conspiracy charges to fracture radical networks—including lesbian and gay activists deeply involved in anti-repression campaigns. His presentation foregrounds the concrete mechanisms of state power and reflects on strategic lessons for movements confronting renewed criminalization and political intimidation today. Soheil Asefi (historian at the CUNY Graduate Center and exiled Iranian queer journalist) revisits the global upheavals of 1979—from Iran and Nicaragua to Grenada and Afghanistan—as a turning point marked by revolutionary possibility and counterrevolutionary violence. He argues that many queer diasporic formations emerged not solely from sexuality-based persecution but from broader political ruptures: imperial conflicts, mass imprisonment and executions of leftists, forced migration, and the neoliberal restructuring that followed. By “queer diaspora,” Asefi refers to queer lives displaced within these wider struggles, where sexuality became entangled with exile, repression, and shifting economic regimes. He asks: what remains of revolutionary horizons once struggles are defeated or absorbed into NGO governance, recognition politics, and market-driven forms of visibility? A third participant (TBA) will extend the discussion to contemporary formations linking queer, anti-imperialist, and labor struggles. Together, the panel argues that resistance is not merely symbolic defiance. It is shaped by repression, sustained through organization, and rooted in conflicts over political economy and empire. If 1979 marked a rupture, its afterlives compel us not only to remember—but to rethink strategy.