Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM): A Political Genealogy of Queer Marxism and Queer of Colour Critique

In this chapter, I engage with the archive of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) to reconstruct a political genealogy of contemporary queer Marxism and queer of colour critique. LGSM was a solidarity group active during the 1984–1985 British miners’ strike. The chapter critically unpacks the LGSM archive by focussing on two debates that took place within the group: on the one hand, a debate over the nature of gay and lesbian solidarity with the miners, thus involving different understandings of the relation between class struggle and sexual politics; on the other hand, a debate about the place of gender and race within the group. As part of this discussion, the chapter also expands the LGSM archive to include two other groups that appear in this story: Lesbians Against Pit Closures (LAPC) and the Black Delegation to the Mining Communities (BDMC). This expanded account of LGSM allows us to draw key genealogical lessons about some of the questions raised today by queer Marxism and queer of colour critique: Can queerness constitute a critical standpoint on society, understood in Marxist terms as a heterogeneous yet structured ‘totality’? And what is the relation between intersectionality and this Marxist practice of totality thinking? Can queer studies recover totality thinking via intersectionality, or does intersectionality participate in reproducing a fragmented view of the social? Before approaching these questions genealogically through the LGSM archive, the chapter outlines the emergence of queer Marxism and queer of colour critique over the past 20 years and introduces the specificity of the genealogical approach in the broader context of the ‘archival turn’ in contemporary queer studies.