Urvashi Vaid Sets Chicago Appearance for 4/3

Longtime LGBT rights advocate Urvashi Vaid will be in Chicago Wed., April 3 for a free event at the Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted. She will discuss and sign copies of her new book, Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class, and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics.
This is her only public program in Chicago.

The event will start at 7 p.m. and is co-hosted by Center on Halsted, the Community Media Workshop; Ellen Stone Belic Institute for Women & Gender in Arts & Media, Columbia College Chicago; and Windy City Times newspaper. Women & Children First Bookstore will have books for sale at the event.

From one of the nation's best-known social justice leaders and community activists comes a strategic and informed argument about the pitfalls of limited political vision, and the benefits of an agenda that encompasses, yet moves beyond, equality.

The LGBT movement is on one of the most active, contested, and engaging social movements in the world. This optimistic book challenges advocates for LGBT rights in the U.S. to aspire beyond the narrow framework of equality. It outlines a more substantive politics with race, class, and gender at its foundation, and suggests that such a politics will produce greater and more meaningful change for a larger number of people.

Irresistible Revolution is intended for a broad and general audience. The book turns an experienced and thoughtful lens onto many common controversies, rhetoric, and strategic questions that face contemporary social change movements: pursuit of broad or narrow agendas, integration of economic and racial justice, integrating sexual orientation and gender identity in human rights frameworks, the persistence of sexism, the dilemmas of bipartisanship, and the challenge of seeing beyond the short term to secure gains made for the long run.