“Shoulder to Shoulder: A Queer History of Solidarity, Coalition and Chaos” By Jake Hall
Different Struggles, Shared Ground
Why is it so hard to raise our voices and act for hardships we ourselves do not face? This book carefully excavates the history of people living through different struggles — race, gender, class, disability, immigration — who have built solidarity across their differences. What the author, a working-class queer writer, weaves together is not a glittering success story. Even as the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement joined forces and scattered seeds of resistance across the world, the path of solidarity was full of conflict and setback — as when Black activists who criticized the war on anti-racist grounds faced backlash from fellow Black activists themselves. Yet the author insists that failure holds precisely the lessons we need to learn. Even in the fleeting excitement of raising one's voice in protest, the author argues, the seeds of real change do take root. Central to the book is its examination of the distinction between solidarity and "allyship" (in which people who are not themselves affected become advocates for those who are socially marginalized). Allyship, the author argues, originally meant a reciprocal relationship of equals fighting together toward a shared goal, but has increasingly been distorted into something non-affected people do to satisfy their own need for validation. What matters in true solidarity is reciprocity — finding common ground across different experiences of oppression. The author reframes resistance not as a single explosive burst of anger but as an ongoing, everyday practice. Discrimination that has seeped into society over centuries cannot simply vanish in an instant. This is precisely why the author finds hope in a spirit that goes beyond merely tearing down existing systems, toward building new structures in different ways. Refusing to resign oneself to the belief that the world as it exists now is all there could ever be — this is the philosophy running through the many movements the book introduces. Today, authoritarianism that threatens the rights of minorities is surging around the world. The history of solidarity this book illuminates offers guidance — to those directly affected and to those in the majority alike — for building, together, in the fabric of everyday life, a more desirable world. Joining hands with others living through different struggles liberates us as well. This book powerfully shows that history itself bears witness to that hope. Translated by Takako Ando. (¥2,640)
