As feminist theory and feminist activism incorporated the insights of feminists of color that gender
justice is necessarily linked to the struggles for racial and class justice—an insight that can be traced back
to nineteenth-century African American feminists—feminists of all generations increasingly came to
expand the contemporary movement’s vision of gender equality. Younger feminists saw themselves as
reaping, in the words of one, “the benefits of all the social justice movements that have come before us;
we have come of age in a world that has been shaped by feminism, queer liberation movements, antiracist
movements, labor movements, and others.”^30 The expansion of feminist ideology is particularly notable
in the women’s movement’s relationship to the modern lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)
movement. Whereas in the late 1960s and early 1970s lesbians often felt unwelcome in straight feminist
spaces and the feminist movement was openly hostile to the burgeoning transgender movement, in the
post-1990 period younger feminists, of all sexual orientations and genders, saw themselves as
inextricably tied to the LGBT movement. Like the feminist movement, the LGBT movement weathered a
great deal of conservative backlash and hostility during this period while also achieving historically
unprecedented gains, including: the 2003 overturning of sodomy laws that made same-sex sexuality illegal
in thirteen states; the 2011 repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which barred the military service of openly
gay and lesbian people; the legalization of same-sex marriage in nineteen U.S. states and the District of
Columbia, so that by mid-2014 nearly 44 percent of the U.S. population now lives in a state where same-
sex couples can legally wed; and the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling that the Defense of Marriage Act
(which prohibited the recognition of such marriages) was unconstitutional. Equally as important as these
legal and legislative rulings was the ever greater visibility, acceptance, and support of lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender people in the United States.
Queerly beloved wedding ceremony in Kaua’i, April 2013. Photograph by Zshots.
After September 11, 2001, feminists increasingly focused their attention on how to work toward a
transnational and global movement for gender justice that did not place U.S. women at the center of
analysis or posit them as the embodiment of gender equality—in other words, an anti-imperialist
feminism that does not assume that “ ‘We’ the liberated Americans must save ‘them’ the oppressed
women,” as Pakistani-American feminist Bushra Rehman argued.^31 The shift to a global vision of
feminism began in the 1970s, as American feminists increasingly made political, activist, and scholarly