Friendship as Social Justice Activism

Friendship as Social Justice Activism brings together academics and activists to have essential conversations about friendship, love, and desire as kinetics for social justice movements. The contributors featured here come from across the globe and are all involved in diverse movements, including LGBTQ rights, intimate-partner violence, addiction recovery, housing, migrant labour, and environmental activism. Each essay narrates how living and organizing within friendship circles offers new ways of dreaming and struggling for social justice.

Recent scholarship in different disciplinary fields as well as activist literature have brought attention to the political possibilities within friendship. The essays, memoirs, poems, and artwork in Friendship as Social Justice Activism address these political possibilities within the context of gender, sexuality, and economic justice movements.

‘This book consists of 27 chapters, excluding the introduction, so it is impossible to share the beauty and brilliance that I witnessed while engaging with each piece of writing. However, I want to make a few special mentions. Alok Vaid-Menon’s piece titled My Summer in Cape Town offers a rich commentary on how the researcher-subject dichotomy produced by American academic settings, with its “pretensions of professionalism and ethics,” can foreclose possibilities of friendship. Debanuj Dasgupta’s first-person narrative The Unruly Grammar of Friendship, presented as a queer epistolary exchange, highlights how friendships can be vital to recovery from addiction, especially in a country where most drugs-related offenders are white but most people imprisoned for drug offenses are not.’—Chintan Girish Modi, Firstpost. Read the detailed review here.

Contents

Introduction
Why Friendship as Social Activism?
Niharika Banerkea, Debanuj Dasgupta, Rohit K. Dasgupta and Jaime M. Grant

Chapter One
Friendship, Affect, and Capitalism
Kaciano Barbosa Gadelha

Chapter Two
Enqueerying Friendships: Radical Ramblings
Paramita Banerjee

Chapter Three
A Love Note to OUT! DC: My First Radical Queer Affinity Group
Amelie Zurn

Chapter Four
rwethereyet: A Conversation
Ajamu, Jane Standing and Marai Larasi

Chapter Five
Kinship, Friendship and Researching Queer Digital Media in India
Rohit K. Dasgupta

Chapter Six
Global Day of Rage in London: Reflecting on Queer Activisms, New Media and Friendship
Rohit K. Dasgupta, Sunil Gupta and Rahul Rao

Chapter Seven
In Terms of ‘the Excess’
Akanksha and Sumita Beethi

Chapter Eight
‘Baar Baar Sakhi’: In Search of the Queer Temporalities of Sakhya
Torsa Ghosal and Kaustavi Sarkar

Chapter Nine
the circle of friends
Aulic

Chapter Ten
The Unruly Grammar of Friendship
Debanuj Dasgupta

Chapter Eleven
Life-Making
Niharika Banerjea

Chapter Twelve
‘I Get by With a Little Help from My Friends’: Ending Domestic Violence One Friendship at a Time
Shannon Perez-Darby

Chapter Thirteen
Seven Is a Prime Number
Sumita Beethi

Chapter Fourteen
What Happens in My Body When I Choose You
Susan Raffo

Chapter Fifteen
Friendship Is Not Magic: Online Echo Chambers in the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum
Jeremy Matthew

Chapter Sixteen
Con Viviere: Friendship as Means to Live Fully
Nila Kamol Krishnan Gupta and Shamira A. Meghani

Chapter Seventeen
Friendship Is an Invisible Blood that Keeps Us Real
Ma Mercedes Alba Benitez

Chapter Eighteen
Thinking the Relational Character of Commoning to Understand Political Activism
Cesare Di Feliciantonio

Chapter Nineteen
Friendship as a Mode of Sustainable Change in the Ready-Made Garment Sector in Bangladesh
Lipi Behym and Maher Anjum

Chapter Twenty
Personal and Political: Friendship as a Feminist Methodological Tool in the Recovery of Anandibai Jaywant’s Life and Writing

Chapter Twenty-one
Conflicts and Intimacies: Rethinking Friendship and Transnational Solidarity
Sam Bullington

Chapter Twenty-two
My Summer in Cape Town: Or, I’m Sorry for Losing You
Alok Vaid-Menon

Chapter Twenty-three
On the Path of Friendship
Mary Adkins-Cartee and Karni Pal Bhati

Chapter Twenty-four
Kissing Friends
Ignacio Rivera

Chapter Twenty-five
Untitled
Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Chapter Twenty-six
Jack and Jaime: Making Love, Making Revolution
Jaime M. Grant and Jack Harrison-Quintana

Chapter Twenty-seven
Concluding Conversation
Niharika Banerjea, Debanuj Dasgupta, Rohit K. Dasgupta and Jaime M. Grant