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Andrew Brock Cohen assignment

In her essay, Punks, Bulldaggers, and, Welfare Queens the Radical Potential of Queer Politics Cathy Cohen argues that “…a truly radical or transformative politics has not resulted from queer activism.” With politics getting any type of change to happen is a long and hard endeavour. For any type of significant change to happen it can take literal years with how rigid politics are. There are several reasons this process takes so long. One of them would be the unwillingness of people to act against politics. The major thought process among people is that if they were to act it would not make any difference; that they should just wait out the present problems in hope that they will fix themselves; or hope for a better person to come into a leading position and leave it to them to fix current problems. This kind of thinking leads to nothing being done in the way of change in a timely fashion. The only true way for change to occur is to speak out against injustice but even that has its drawbacks. Cohen finds that the one of the largest failings of queer theory and queer politics has been their inability to incorporate into the analysis of the world and strategies for political mobilization the roles that race, class, and gender play in defining people’s differing relations to dominant and normalizing power. For political change to work, those vying for it must avoid infighting as it only halts the process to achieve change. Power relations add to this problem as stating dominance over another based on, as an example, not holding a leading position such as a planner can cause the major reason of halting feeling useless or unneeded. Instead of making enemies of each other or excluding others based on race or class the common enemy must be focused on in order to instate political change.