politics

Gramsci for sure, but also Theodor Adorno (especially enjoyed Jargon of Authenticity) and Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed for understanding the ways that oppressive ideology self-reproduces; Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized and Decolonization and the Decolonized;

and, more specifically for ways that "dominant queer theory" can erase identities within even domestic movements, Julia Serrano's Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, Angela Pattatuchi Aragón's Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional and Queer Perspectives, Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects and Others, and Viviane K. Namaste's Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People

For explorations of this type of Western-progressive imperialism: Lila Abu-Lughod's Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Nada Elia's Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine, Saffo Papantanopoulou's Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude, and one I massively recommend, Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.

These three are a bit more of a tangent, but Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock's Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, Dean Spade's Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, and Eric A. Stanley's Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex are all great ways to really get at the heart of how American calls for "trans rights/protections" are often channeled towards increased policing, surveillance, militarized borders, and, ultimately, violence against racialized minorities and especially racialized queer people. From within America, it is essential for analyses of queer rights, and for calls for queer safety, to maintain a deeply rigid and principled stance against co-optation for furthering state violence, which is why any such calls from within the US to examine queerphobia abroad not only minimizes the violence faced domestically, but also serves to strengthen imperialist narratives of the necessity of aggression/destabilization of the state's enemies.