Dr Mori Reithmayr is a queer intellectual historian and political theorist. Their research recovers the history of US queer political thought as a means of probing wider theoretical questions concerning the meaning of “community,” the historical connections of Black and gay theorizing, and the worldmaking power of ideas. Before their Postdoctoral Fellowship at the RAI, Mori completed their DPhil in Politics at New College, Oxford in April 2023.
Mori’s current book project Ideas for Power: The Invention of Gay Community, 1953-1969 offers the first study of the early life of the idea of a gay community. Contrary to widely held beliefs, the notion of a gay community did not emerge naturally or inevitably from an expanding mid-twentieth century gay culture. It had to be invented – theorized, defended, disseminated, and actively summoned into being. Ideas for Power reconstructs the history of this process from its roots in post-war gay resistance to police repression, to the coinage of ‘gay community’ during gay activist José Sarria’s pioneering 1961 campaign for San Francisco City Supervisor, to the articulation of the concept of a ‘national gay community’ at a series of national gay conferences in the late 1960s. At each step, it recovers the debates the so-called ‘homophile’ activists of the 1950s and 1960s – lesbians, gay men, street youth, and their allies – held over the nature, membership, and scope of ‘community’, sets them within the context of their wider political projects, and shows how homophile notions of community were always ‘ideas for power’: concepts purposefully carved and wielded to build collective power – whether of the movement writ large or only of a select cadre of activists.
Mori is a former Stipendiary Lecturer in Politics at University College, Oxford, and a former co-convenor of the Oxford Queer Studies Network (now, Queer Intersections Oxford). Their writing has appeared in GEDENKDIENST and with the BAAS Historical Perspectives on Gendered State Violence.
