This article offers an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms, based on a feminist and queer reading of the work of French thinker Roland Barthes. Building on Barthes’s peculiar conception of what he calls “the Neutral” and revisiting his work in light of feminist and queer scholarship on sexual (in)difference, my main goal is to reshape our understanding of what it means to be gender neutral. In opposition to classical conceptions of neutrality associated with passivity, indifference, and blandness, I show (...) that Barthes’s Neutral can be conceived as an active gesture, which alters common systems of meanings and power, including the gender binary. But this conception of the Neutral, I argue, neither refers to a call for an androgynous, queer, or nonbinary gender experience. It does not target gender embodiments but gender regulations—that is, the social enforcement of gender categories (by way, for instance, of administrative forms, single-sex bathrooms, or normalizing attitudes toward others). A gender-neutral arrangement, therefore, refers to an ethical, administrative, social, or spatial relation in which subjects are not assigned based on gender categories. This practice of gender suspension, I show, has two main transformative effects. First, it opens a space of freedom and livability for gender-nonconforming subjects. Second, it contributes to lessening the significance of sexual difference in social life and therefore alleviating its symbolic and normative weight for everyone. (shrink)

When we participate in political debate or protests, we are judged by how we look, which clothes we wear, by our skin colour, gender and body language. This results in exclusions and limits our freedom of expression. The Politics of Becoming explores radical democratic acts of disidentification to counter this problem. Anonymity in masked protest, graffiti, and online de-bate interrupts our everyday identities. This allows us to live our multiple selves. In the digital age, anonymity becomes an inherent part of (...) everyday communication. Through our smart devices we express our selves differently. As cyborgs, our identities are disrupted and reassembled. We curate self-representations on social media, create avatars, share selfies and choose the skin colour of our emojis. The Politics of Becoming encourages us to engage in a revolution of the self. Democratic pluralism is not only a matter of institutional design but also about how we express our identities. Inner revolutions change our personal realities and plant a seed for democratic futures. (shrink)

This paper initiates analytic inquiry into the metaphysics of masculinity. I argue that individual masculinities (such as ‘clone masculinity’ and ‘incel masculinity’) are distinct homeostatic property cluster kinds related to gender structures via processes of adherence, failed-adherence, selective adherence, and/or reinterpretation with respect to male-coded social norms.

In times of current crisis, the voices of women are needed more than ever. The accumulation of war and environmental catastrophes teaches us that exploitation of people and nature through violent appropriation and enrichment for the sake of short-term self-interest exacts its price. This book presents contributions on the currently most relevant and most urgent issues: reshaping the economy, environmental problems, technology and the re-reading of history from the non-western and western tradition. With an outlook into the problems of class, (...) race and gender in its intersectional framing, the collection offers a unique overview of current research in these fields and contributes to the renewal and contemporary presentation of feminist thought from partly concrete perspectives with regard to factual issues. (shrink)

This article argues that through her songs and music videos Pagan Poetry, Cocoon and Hidden Place, versatile artist Björk is able to carve out a space for erotic tenderness. This erotic tenderness will be unearthed as a queer or minor sexuality, in the sense that it goes against a phallic and genital majoritarian account of sexuality. Tender sexuality might not be obviously queer, yet a detour through the early work of Freud will show how our hegemonic account of sexuality is (...) built upon a repression of such a tender sexuality. Freud’s psychoanalysis is only able to regard this sexual tenderness in a negative vein as a pathological symptom. Supported primarily by the works of Deleuze, Guattari and Muñoz, this article will propose that Björk’s artistry is able to produce a line of flight outside of this tender-less sexuality, liberating an otherwise repressed minor tender sexuality through a visually and sonically becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-BwO and becoming-molecular. (shrink)

The proliferation of work by autistic writers continues apace, defying a long and multidisciplinary tradition of constructing autistic people as lacking the capacity for narration. To study neurodivergent literature, then, is to witness the refusal of these exclusionary narrative conventions, and to register the ideological presuppositions that underpin pathologization. In this article, I engage with recent insights from Neurodiversity Studies to explore the connections between narrative neuronormativity and other discourses of oppression, especially those that have generated racialized, gendered, and colonial (...) narratives of desubjectification. Focusing on the neuroqueer movement—an emergent practice of disidentification that refuses the interpellations of neuronormativity, ableism, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity—I discuss the concept of allism, arguing that this satirical critique of pathologization harbors a deconstructive force that denaturalizes the dialectic of recognition. Pursuing the discursive context and theoretical implications of this critique, I provide a short genealogy of narrative neuronormativity, connecting the operation of the dialectic in the early novel to the clinical texts of child psychology. To demonstrate the neuroqueer subversion of this tradition, I then read An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon, a text that stages a disidentification with storytelling. Protagonist Aster’s neuroqueer refusal indexes the concomitance of the construction of Blackness as an ontological foil for whiteness and the construction of autism as a standard of disordered sociality that neuronorms can be measured against. My reading of Unkindness suggests that the extant techniques of literary narratorship are political instruments that will, unless repurposed, continue to disseminate these dispossessive dialectics. (shrink)

There are few sartorial ensembles as heavily signified as masculine as a suit. This article focuses on the suit within queer fashion digital cultures and spaces to explore how butch of colour digital fashion suits up to offer us different ways to think about masculinity. Intervening in the erasure of women of colour in histories of fashion – including menswear – and histories of sexuality – butch, dapper, tomboy, dandy – I argue that butch digital fashion works as a site (...) and composition of flesh, fabric and feeling that reworks masculinity as a project of embodiment. I look at three interwoven dimensions of butch digital fashion – aesthetic process, texture as feeling and spatial imaginations – attending to the themes of fantasy, desire and pleasure. I situate butch within and between fashion studies and media studies to offer butch as a relation, practice, orientation and site of embodiment to think about being and becoming, about the body politics of space and feeling, as matters of race, sexuality, class and gender – and the materialities of race, sexuality, class and gender, mediated by the global, and as the global by the digital. Digital butch fashion is, at once, a visual culture, a creative visual space, a resource of queer fantasy and an aesthetic process. It is messy, tense and fraught with the politics of race, colonialism and class, yet at the same time, dense with possibility, pleasure and eroticism. Butch of colour fashion offers frames and forms for rethinking and remaking masculinity as a sign of a body, as a category of personhood, as a set of practices and feelings made coherent by processes of embodiment. (shrink)

This article elucidates and expands on María Lugones's account of complex communication across liminal sites as the basis for deep coalitions among oppressed groups. The analysis underscores the crucial role that emotions and resistant imaginations play in complex communication and world-traveling across liminal sites. In particular, it focuses on the role of emotional echoing and epistemic activism in complex forms of communication among oppressed subjects. It elucidates Gloria Anzaldúa's storytelling and Doris Salcedo's visual art as exemplary forms of epistemic activism (...) that issue coalitional gestures and critical provocations that can wake people up from their epistemic slumbers and instigate forms of complex communication that can create new possibilities for coalitional politics. (shrink)

The work of artist Ron Athey has long befuddled the art historical establishment and has mostly remained under the philosophical radar. In this review of Athey’s Acephalous Monster, performed on August 28, 2021, at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in Los Angeles, I propose a philosophical frame- work for Athey’s radical reinvention of ethical categories like agency, mutuality and communion. I describe the performance and its critical context in order to tease out the aesthetic dimension of this reinvention and (...) the subversive power of reconstituting personhood along lines of collective artistic jubilation and creative survival. (shrink)

Identity politics is subject to similar critiques in contemporary public debate and political theory. A central topos of this critique is that identity politics is essentializing: it fixes subjects to their social position and resorts to a politics of particularity that leads to divisions in national citizenship and democratic discourse (the communitarian and liberal position) and to divisions within social movements (the critical position). Contrary to this one-sided critique, we propose a different interpretation with the concept of “constructivist identity politics.” (...) We show that political identities are not essentialistically given, but emerge from processes of social and political construction; that they are actively produced, learned, and practiced by political (sub)cultures and movements. In these processes of construction, political articulation and agency are produced, enabling subjects to critique relations of domination and discrimination. Following radical democratic theory, we argue that the particular political perspectives of identity politics thus enabled do not endanger democracy or solidarity in social movements, but contribute to their further democratization by actualizing the universal principles of democracy in particular disputes. While the construction processes of identity politics tend to essentialize and produce exclusions, critical reflection on such tendencies is also inherent to identity politics. This understanding also enables a critique of such identity politics that is not oriented towards the democratic values of equality and freedom and blocks critical self-reflection. After an overview of contemporary identity politics critique, we elaborate this constructivist understanding following debates in feminist and postcolonial theory since the 1980s. Building on this, we systematically develop the notion of constructivist identity politics by differentiating three aspects of it: subjectification, articulation, and representation. We refer to approaches by Foucault, Rancière, Laclau/Mouffe, and Hall and illustrate the respective aspects through examples of migrant self-organizations as well as gay culture and queer critique. (shrink)

The paper explores the portrayal of social relations among youth in the popular Norwegian TV-series Skam and places this analysis in relation to Anne Imhof’s award-winning performance piece Faust, which received the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale for the German Pavilion. As expressions of how today’s youth experience social relations under the conditions of late capitalism, I examine the way in which the TV-series and the performance work respectively explore when and how ‘we’ is shaped. I argue that (...) they provide particular insight into the limits and possibilities for the formation of relations of solidarity today. (shrink)

Current radical democratic politics is characterized by new participatory spaces for citizens’ engagement, which aim at facilitating the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. These spaces are, however, situated in the context of deep societal inequalities. Modes of discrimination are carried over into participatory interaction. The democratic subject is judged by its physically embodied appearance, which replicates external hierarchies and impedes the freedom of self-expression. To tackle this problem, this article seeks to identify ways to increase the freedom of the (...) subject to explore its multiple self. Understanding the self as inherently fugitive, the article investigates participatory, deliberative and agonistic concepts of self-transformation. As all of them appear limited, it introduces a transformative perspective in democratic thought. Enriching the transformative perspective with queer and gender theory, the article generates the concept of a politics of becoming, which, through radical democratic practices of disidentification, advances the freedom of the subject to change. (shrink)

This case study of the feminist drag troupe the Disposable Boy Toys examines the relationship between drag and gender identity. Drawing on multiple methods, the author explores the range of gender identities that emerged through participation in DBT. Members saw DBT as the central catalyst for their own identity shifts. The author suggests that these identity transformations occurred through four collective mechanisms: imaginative possibility, information and resources, opportunities for enactment, and social support. The author finds that DBT served as an (...) identity incubator in which participants were able and encouraged to interrogate, play with, and sometimes adopt new gender identities. The author concludes that context is critical in understanding the meaning and importance of drag. Performing gender in this politicized, feminist context shaped the gender identities of the troupe's members in fundamental and varied ways, suggesting that oppositional communities can be an important venue for identity work. (shrink)

This article explores a gendered dimension of war and conflict analysis that has up until now received little attention at the intersection of gender studies and studies of global politics: queer bodies in, and genderqueer significations of, war and conflict. In doing so, the article introduces the concept of cisprivilege to International Relations as a discipline and security studies as a core sub-field. Cisprivilege is an important, but under-explored, element of the constitution of gender and conflict. Whether it be in (...) controversial reactions to the suggestion of United Nations Special Rapporteur Martin Scheinin that airport screenings for terrorists not discriminate against transgendered people, or in structural violence that is ever-present in the daily lives of many individuals seeking to navigate the heterosexist and cissexist power structures of social and political life, war and conflict is embodied and reifies cissexism. This article makes two inter-related arguments: first, that both the invisibility of genderqueer bodies in historical accounts of warfare and the visibility of genderqueer bodies in contemporary security strategy are forms of discursive violence; and second, that these violences have specific performative functions that can and should be interrogated. After constructing these core arguments, the article explores some of the potential benefits of an interdisciplinary research agenda that moves towards the theorisation of cisprivilege in security theory and practice. (shrink)

This article discusses sorrow in terms of its resistant possibilities. It describes bodies of color as ontological sites of sorrow in the context of racism and xenophobia. This sorrow, however, does not condemn these bodies to hopelessness and erasure. Rather, it may constitute a rupture with a present that fails to acknowledge racist and xenophobic practices. In addition, it connects sorrow to the kind of melancholia that bodies of color experience given their being-in-worlds that consider them unwanted, unworthy, and disposable. (...) By way of photographic analysis, this article also presents the notion of aesthetic unsettlement in order to point to coalitional possibilities across experiences and histories of woundedness, melancholia, and sorrow. (shrink)

This paper questions the connection between vaginas and feminist embodiment in The Vagina Monologues and considers how the text both challenges and reinscribes systems of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and ableism. I use the Intersex Society of North America's critique as a point of departure and argue that the text offers theorists and activists in feminist, queer, and disability communities an opportunity to understand how power operates in both dominant discourses that degrade vaginas and strategies of feminist resistance that seek to (...) reclaim and celebrate them. (shrink)

This paper offers a new interpretation of Austin (the New Austin) that overcomes the Austin-Derrida debate by dissolving the dichotomy between construction and deconstruction and focusing on the notion of performative reconstruction. The essay also contains a discussion of the normative distinction between felicity and infelicity and how it affects the identity of speakers and agents. This discussion draws on recent Gender and Queer Theory and builds a bridge between the literature on identity and Speech Act Theory. The central argument (...) in this paper proposes a negotiating model of performativity and a robust notion of discursive responsibility that underscores the intimate and unavoidable links between the semantic and the socio-political. (shrink)

The connections between the fields of queer theory and continental philosophy are strange and strained: simultaneously difficult and all too easy to ferret out, there is no easy narrative for how the two fields interconnect. Both sides of the relation seem either to disavow or simply repress any relation to the other. For example, despite the impact of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume One on early queer theory, current work in queer of color critique challenges the politics and epistemology of (...) placing this text in such a canonical position, particularly for the adamantly anti-foundational field of queer theory. 1 On the other hand, continental philosophy, perhaps in its ongoing beleaguered attempt to form an identity within the analytically dominated discipline of philosophy in the United States, 2 seems largely to ignore the growth of queer theory, despite the provocative and invigorating work on some of continental philosophy's most beloved topics, such as temporality, embodiment, desire, the negative, and radically anti-foundational subjectivity, epistemology, and politics. Setting aside the thorny project of their genealogical connections and disconnections, this essay turns to current trajectories in the field of queer theory, particularly the heated debates about temporality and the future, to indicate how this contemporary scholarship both draws on and exceeds a grounding in continental philosophy. (shrink)

: This paper questions the connection between vaginas and feminist embodiment in The Vagina Monologues and considers how the text both challenges and reinscribes (albeit unintentionally) systems of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and ableism. I use the Intersex Society of North America's critique as a point of departure and argue that the text offers theorists and activists in feminist, queer, and disability communities an opportunity to understand how power operates in both dominant discourses that degrade vaginas and strategies of feminist resistance (...) that seek to reclaim and celebrate them. (shrink)

Coming out, or the disclosure of a minority identity, features prominently across disciplines, including several subfields of sociological research. In the context of sexuality, theoretical arguments offer competing predictions. Some studies propose that coming out is increasingly an unremarkable life transition as the stigma associated with non-heterosexualities attenuates, while others posit entrenched discrimination. Rather than testing these theories or providing incremental evidence in support of one position, we use 52 in-depth interviews with recently-out individuals to explain how identity disclosures in (...) the present moment can validate plural possibilities. Our findings show that ambivalence is the core narrative which animates the contemporary coming out process. Respondents identify three interpretive frameworks that structure their experience of sexuality as at once incidental and central: generational differences, identity misrecognitions, and interfacing with institutions. We also detail a fourth theme, intersectionality, which shows the analytic limits of ambivalence in the coming out process. These patterns suggest more broadly that sexuality, like ethnicity, may provide symbolic resources—“distinguishing but not defining”—in the service of crafting a modern sexual self. (shrink)

Events in 2020 have sparked a reimagination of how both individuals and institutions should consider race, power, health, and marginalization in society. In a response to these developments, we exa...

This article examines gay men’s efforts to break into the exclusive traditional fraternity institution by adopting the hegemonic model on their own terms. The authors examined to what extent members of a national gay fraternity, Delta Lambda Phi challenged or modified the entrenched fraternity culture that was hostile to homosexuals and whether they resisted or reproduced hegemonic masculinity in their efforts to redefine the meaning of college fraternities. This research examines gay fraternities in relation to two dimensions of hegemonic masculinity. (...) The authors explore how members of gay fraternities negotiated their stigmatized status among other men—that is, within the internal dimension of hegemonic masculinity. They explore the external dimension of hegemonic masculinity by analyzing how gay brothers, as men, related to all women. The authors further examine the connection between these two hegemonic dimensions and provide evidence showing how these two dimensions are coupled or disjointed. (shrink)

This article analyses the representational stakes of queer of colour performance, by taking the case study of the Cocoa Butter Club: queer of colour cabaret night in London. Within a British landscape that has silenced queer subjectivities of colour at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality, I explore the potential of QPOC performance to redress historical erasure. To enact their presence, I argue that the Cocoa Butter Club’s performers showcase their collective disidentification from the scripts pre-assigned to their bodies (...) within the European imagination. By doing so, they disrupt hegemonic representations of queerness and racialised otherness, making room for a multitude of queer of colour becomings kept otherwise invisible from public view. Such disidentifications unleash ‘ghosts’ into the public space, spectres of elided subjectivities and unresolved coloniality within a city that likes to think of itself as a post-racial LGBT haven. Drawing on ethnographic material and interviews with performers, I analyse what happens when such queer of colour hauntings reach the audience’s gaze. I consider their unsettling effects in relation to the white gaze, as well as their empowering function in relation to desiring QPOC subjects, seeking reflections of themselves in spectatorship. (shrink)

In the last few years, it has become a commonplace to state that domination takes place through a multiplicity of axes, where gender, class, race, and sexuality intersect with one another. While a lot of insightful empirical work is being done under the heading of intersectionality, it is very rarely linked to the anarchist tradition that preceded it. In this article, I would like to articulate this point by showing the usefulness but also the limits of the notion of intersectionality (...) to understand mechanisms of domination and then move on to argue for the need of an anarcha-feminist research program. Secondly, I will try to provide the philosophical framework for such an enterprise by arguing that it is in a Spinozist ontology of the transindividual that we can best find the conceptual resources for thinking about the plural nature of women’s bodies and thus of their oppression. This will allow me to attempt to articulate the question of ‘what it means to be a woman’ in pluralistic terms and thus also to defend a specifically feminist form of anarchism. In conclusion, I will go back to the anarcha-feminist tradition and will show why today it is the best possible ally of feminism in the pursuit of a critical theory of society. (shrink)

Hermeneutical injustice is being unjustly prevented from making sense of one’s experiences, identity, or circumstances and/or communicating about them. The literature focusses almost exclusively on whether people have access to adequate conceptual resources. In this paper, we discuss a different kind of hermeneutical struggle caused by stigma. We argue that in some cases of hermeneutic injustice people have access to hermeneutical resources apt to understand their identity but reject employing these due to the stigma attached to the identity. We begin (...) with a reinterpretation of one of the cases discussed in the literature, Edmund White’s novel A Boy’s Own Story. We argue that in this case hermeneutic resources are available but are rejected due to the stigma attached to homosexuality. We then present two analogous kinds of cases: alcohol addiction and being the victim of intimate partner violence. Here, too, hermeneutic injustice occurs because of stigma attached to an identity rather than unavailability of resources. We close by suggesting that these cases may, additionally, involve the wrong of Tightlacing: by meddling with their self-conception, stigma can manipulate individuals into a view of themselves that licenses inappropriate demands on them and makes them complicit in an erasure of their identities. (shrink)

Though there is a vast literature on performances of drag, performances of gender and sexual transgressions outside of drag clubs are less studied. This case study of men’s marches protesting violence against women—“Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” marches— examines the politics of such transgressions. Cross-dressing to various degrees is strategically utilized at these events in an attempt to encourage men to become empathetic allies. This article suggests, however, that context is critical to the political potential of performances of drag. (...) The author’s observations of the interactions at the marches suggest that drag at “Walk a Mile” marches often symbolically reproduces gender and sexual inequality despite good intentions. At these marches, feminism is gendered when performances of politics and protest are contextually framed as gender and/or sexual transgressions when “feminism” is understood as “feminine.”. (shrink)

What if depression, in the Americas at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to biochemical imbalances? This article seeks alternatives to the medical model found in most depression memoirs by considering how the epistemological and methodological struggles faced by a scholar of the African diaspora confronted by the absent archive of slavery are relevant to discussions of political depression. Combining scholarly investigation and (...) personal memoir, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother exemplifies feminism’s affective turn not only by bringing personal narrative into scholarship, but by seeking reparation for the past in the affective dynamics of cultural memory rather than in legal reform or state recognition. Stubbornly refusing to find solace in an African past before slavery, though, Hartman provides a model of emotional reparation in which feelings of loss and alienation persist. Her work suggests the relevance of political depression to both the ordinary life of racism and to what gets called clinical depression. (shrink)

‘Why Queer Diaspora?’ intervenes at the intersection of queer theory and diaspora studies to ask how the conditions of geographical mobility produce new experiences and understandings of sexuality and gender identity. More particularly, this essay argues against a prevalent critical slippage between queer and diaspora, through which the queer is read as a mobile category that, like diaspora, disrupts the stability of fixed identity categories and thus represents a liberatory position within the material and geographical displacements of globalization. Instead, I (...) posit that the work of ‘queering’ diaspora must be to examine the new articulations of normative and queer as they emerge in the transformations of the late twentieth century. To this end, the essay looks to two contemporary documentaries, Remote Sensing (Ursula Biemann, 2001) and Mariposas en el Andamio/butterflies on the Scaffold (Margaret Gilpin and Luis Felipe Bernaza, 1996), as models of alternative articulations of the queer and the diasporic. Ultimately, I argue, it is a focus on the labour through which the seemingly natural categories of gender and sexuality are produced, that a queer diasporic criticism might offer. (shrink)

Dieser Beitrag gibt einen Überblick der zentralen postsäkularen Debatten im Kontext der Schnittstelle von Religions- und Geschlechterforschung. Aus postkolonialer, postsäkularer und Geschlechter-/queerer Perspektive ist eine eigene Epistemologie für die Untersuchung von ‚Religion‘ und ‚Geschlecht‘ entwickelt worden. Die Methode der Intersektionalität wird für die Analyse von ‚Religion‘ überarbeitet. Die Kategorie ‚Religion‘, die in der Geschlechterforschung häufig vernachlässigt oder essentialisiert wird, wird in Abhängigkeit von ‚Geschlecht‘, ‚Sexualität‘, ‚Race‘, ‚Nation‘, ‚Klasse‘, ‚Spezies‘ etc. weiterdiskutiert und als diskursive, intersektionale, performative Kategorie elaboriert. ‚Geschlecht‘ und ‚Religion‘ (...) werden als diskursive, intersektionale, performative Kategorien der Wissensproduktion erarbeitet. Diese Kategorien werden nicht nur dekonstruiert und deessentialisiert, sondern konsequent denaturalisiert und desidentifiziert, um epistemische Gewalt zu überkommen. Weiterhin kann Religion – konzeptualisiert als Wissenskategorie – nicht nur zum individuellen, sondern auch zum kollektiven Handlungsmachtgewinn beisteuern. Zudem werden Weiterentwicklungen feministischer Theorie im postsäkularen Kontext und in der queer-feministisch-materialistischen Theoriebildung und Religion diskutiert. (shrink)

This paper underlines the surprising ways in which subject formation, agency and human flourishing emerge in counter discourses. As examples I offer a post-colonial critique of Rosa Parks in the USA and Fayza in the film Cairo 678. Economic and epistemic violence of neo-liberalism, neo-colonialism, racism, fundamentalism, nationalism, classism, sexism, homophobia, speciesism, etc. call for a critique of religion with corresponding answers. For such a project, the analysis brings together the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the post-colonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (...) and questions their notions of religion and gender as well as resistance and representation. Spivak’s critique of capitalism, the post-colonial condition and epistemic violence in terms of gender constructions is seminal. However, her understanding of ‘religion’ remains ambivalent, yet influences post-colonial theologies tremendously. Bonhoeffer is interesting for a de-essentialized understanding of religion in the post-secular context, because he keeps the tension between a secularized world, engagement with the world and the appreciation of religious knowledge. His final perspective on gender and representation might be more advanced than expected. (shrink)

In this essay I show that texts by early Caribbean women writers, such as the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, reveal and resist the effects of colonial paradigms by leaving textual traces of how such paradigms can effectively be countered and overturned. I arrive at such a reading of Seacole via an analysis of Frantz Fanon's reading of Mayotte Capécia's turn-of-the-century novel, Je suis martiniquaise, in light of advances in postcolonial and feminist theory. I argue that doing (...) so can bring us to recognize the contributions that early writings by Caribbean women have made to a broader understanding of the nature of being, across differences of “race,” class, and geography. I consider how we might recover in Capécia important models that Fanon himself replicates, yet dismisses, that predate Capécia's own text and that can be located in a text like Seacole's. In the end, I come to contend that Mary Seacole's text is more than a mere record of a “free colored” woman's life in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is, to use today's postcolonial parlance, an interventionist, hybrid text that attempts to subvert dominant discourse while participating in its circuits. (shrink)

Engaging feminist and queer of color theory as well as work emerging from social movements, this piece critically examines narratives of impasse between Black Studies and Native Studies in the US, particularly assertions of incommensurability between the goals of Black freedom and Native sovereignty. The article outlines some of the theoretical debates between Black and Indigenous Studies that have calcified into impasses, focusing particularly on Afropessimist and Settler Colonial Studies’ framings of either slavery/anti-Blackness or settler colonialism as the foundational violence (...) around which a racist/settler modernity is structured. This article argues that approaches that emphasize relationality and the co-determination of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism can help us to think beyond a Black/Native impasse and towards a mutual futurity for both Black and Indigenous people in living in the place we currently call the United States. (shrink)

This paper explores the political potential of digital failure as a refusal to work in service of today’s dataveillance society. Moving beyond criticisms of flawed digital systems, this paper traces the moments of digital failure that seek to break, rather than fix, existing systems. Instead, digital failure is characterized by pesky data that sneaks through the cracks of digital capitalism and dissipates into the unproductive; it supports run-away data prone to misidentifications by digital marketers, coders, and content moderators; and it (...) celebrates data predisposed to “back-talk” with playful irreverence toward those that seek to bring order through normative categorization and moderation. I call these data entropic, fugitive, and queer and explore their mischievous practices through three case studies: the unaccountable data in identity resolution, public shaming of the ImageNet training data, and reading practices of sex worker and influencer, @Charlieshe. Together these case studies articulate the political potential of digital failure as a process of unbecoming the good data subject by pushing past the margins of legibility, knowability, and thinkability, to reveal what is made illegible, unknowable, and unthinkable to data’s seeing eye. As predictive analytics, automated decision-systems, and artificial intelligence take on increasingly central roles in public governance, digital failure reveals how data itself is a flawed concept prone to political abuse and social engineering to protect the interests of the powerful, while keeping those marginalized over-surveilled and underrepresented. (shrink)

In the context of the continuing dominance of delocalised Western feminist theoretical models, which allow the non-Western and not quite Western ‘others’ to either be epistemically annihilated or appropriated, it becomes crucial to look for transformative feminist theoretical tools which can eventually help break the so-called mere recognition patterns and move in the direction of transversal dialogues, mutual learning practices and volatile but effective feminist coalitions. Speaking from the position of postcolonial and postsocialist feminist others vis-a-vis the dominant Western/northern gender (...) studies mainstream, and drawing on examples from a broad range of social contexts (from the Armenian queer social movement to a recent Indian gang rape controversy), the authors of this article address the validity of two such transformative feminist tools: border thinking that operates on a more general theoretical level, and disidentification that offers a more praxial operational realisation of the border principle. (shrink)

Based on an ethnographic project in a public high school in a low-income neighborhood in South Los Angeles, this paper argues that access to information and communication technologies cannot be taken as helpful or empowering on its own terms; instead, concerns about justice must be accounted for by the local communities technology is meant to benefit. This paper juxtaposes the concept of technological access with recent work in feminist science and technology studies on infrastructure, maintenance, and ethics. In contrast to (...) popular descriptions of ICTs as emancipatory and transformative, in the setting of an urban school, access produced extensive demands for attention, time, and information. This paper focuses on the labor of a group of student workers, Student Technology Leaders, and how they became responsible for the significant amount of repair and maintenance work involved in keeping hundreds of new computing devices available for use. An expanded process of accounting can more realistically frame issues of justice and its relationship to ICTs. I use a town hall meeting held with these students as an example of a processual vision of justice, one that encourages the beneficiaries of technological access to evaluate costs, benefits, and ethical concerns together. (shrink)

Drawing on 10 years of activism in Turkey’s trans movement and seven months of fieldwork in Istanbul on mutually formed mother and daughter relationship among trans women, this article looks at alternative understandings of ‘inter-generational’ transmission of memory. How can we engage alternative family making processes and non-normative formations of time with memory transmission rather than merely identify ‘inter-generational’ memory in advance with pre-established non-normative systems? Or can we talk about ‘inter-generational’ memories without knowing what ‘generation’ really means? Inspired by (...) these questions, Marianne Hirsch’s work on postmemory and narratives of self-identified trans mothers and daughters, in this article the author discusses the conceptualization of ‘queer postmemory’ in order to think critically on unmarked temporal and familial dimensions in the study of collective and personal memory. While refusing to position memory as an outcome of predetermined temporal frameworks within normative understandings of family, the author looks at strangely remembered things through glimpses of other types of time, other types of relationalities and other types of inheritability. (shrink)

This essay theorizes the fashion photographic image as a privileged site for queer sensory experience. It takes the stance that the aesthetic engagement with the fashion image occurs through sensation, and more precisely, through a haptic and periperformative experience that activates desires, meanings, and fantasies. Through the circulation of feelings sparked via the sensorial experiencing of the photo, queer subjects can sense belongings and form affiliations that bind them in an egalitarian community of sense exceeding sexual and social differences. A (...) queer theory of fashion photography does not posit that the photographic image may foster propositional knowledge in the viewers, but rather that it moves them to engage corporeally with the image and triggers their imagination to configure new affective modes of being in the world. (shrink)

Can literature make it possible to represent histories that are otherwise ineffable? Making use of the Deleuzian concept of “the powers of the false,” Doro Wiese offers readings of three novels that deal with the Shoah, with colonialism, and with racialized identities. She argues that Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, and Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing are novels in which a space for unvoiced, silent, or silenced difference is created. Seen through (...) the lens of Deleuze and his collaborators’ philosophy, literature is a means for mediating knowledge and affects about historical events. Going beyond any simple dichotomy between true and untrue accounts of what “really” happened in the past, literature’s powers of the false incite readers to long for a narrative space in which painful or shameful stories can be included. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss how the space of the classroom is a contested object that is constituted by historical, cultural, political, social, psychological, and discursive practices (Lefebvre in The production of space, Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 1991). I then employ Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “assemblage” to characterize the ways in which educational spaces cohere “content and affect” quoted in Puar (Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times, Duke University Press, Durham, 2007, 193) into discursive figures of the heteronormative and racialized (...) national “family.” Finally, I argue that in order to advance contemporary theorizing on safe space we might consider shifting the metaphor of the classroom (and/or schooling) as a situation of home (in loco parentis) to that of a metaphor of camp. As a discursive practice, “camp” is like “home” in that it has multiple associations of past histories. However, the advantage of the metaphor of classroom as camp allows for a more capacious range of past histories of association, from recreation to temporary inhabitation to forced relocation, thus foregrounding the innate political implications of theorizing space. Moreover, the metaphor of camp implies transience (whether real or imaginary) while keeping in mind the partial and situated nature of particular places and spaces. Foregrounding the transient component/feature of safe space allows us to make visible and explore the possibilities and limitations of conceptualizing relations of power as circuitous, contested and performative through competing claims to particular places as objects of safety. (shrink)

This article provides an introductory guide to queer scholarship in religious studies and theology. It also outlines approaches to queer studies and how they have been, and might be, appropriated in religious studies and theology. Finally, the article argues that greater clarity is needed when naming projects as “queer,” given that the terms “queer,” “queer theory,” and “queer studies” cover such a wide variety of approaches.

This paper reports on a two-year, field-based study set in a charter management organization, a not-for-profit educational organization that operates 18 public schools exclusively in the Black and Latinx communities of South and East Los Angeles. At CMO-LAX, the nine-member Data Team pursues the organization's avowed mission of making public schools data-driven, primarily through the aggregation, analysis, and visualization of digital data derived from quotidian educational activities. This paper draws on the theory of racialized organizations to characterize aspects of data-driven (...) management of public education as practiced by CMO-LAX. I explore two examples of how CMO-LAX shapes data to support racial projects: the reconstruction of the figure of chronic truants and the incorporation of this figure in a calculative regime of student accomplishment. Organizational uses of data support a strategy I call productive myopia, a way of pursuing racial projects via seemingly independent, objective quantifications. This strategy allows the organization to claim to mitigate racial projects and, simultaneously, to accommodate them. This paper concludes by arguing for approaches to research and practice that center racial projects, particularly when data-intensive tools and platforms are incorporated into the provision of public goods and services such as education. (shrink)

The question of whether a (queer) politics of utopia can be located in the past, the future or the present conjures a set of ambivalences and dichotomies, of which the creativity–negativity debate and the (non)future of neoliberalism are cogent for feminist praxis. Convergences can be traced between understandings of utopia grounded in everyday experimentation and queer feminist critiques of normativity as a life project as well as an ongoing educational project. This article dissects social critic, psychologist, poet, novelist and anarchist (...) Paul Goodman’s essay ‘The politics of being queer’ (1969), reading it through a queer feminist lens in order to shed new light on his ‘buried conversations’ with feminism. Mindful of and in opposition to Goodman’s controversial avowal of ‘masculinities’—most notably in his Growing Up Absurd (1960)—the article situates his idea(s) of freedom-autonomy and the disidentifications he proposed—with gay liberation agendas/movements, with bisexuality, with ‘masculinity’—within a wider feminist educational/pedagogical project of experimenting with utopia in the here and now. Goodman’s calls for a liberated society left us a utopian imaginary for engaging with an embodied politics for the present—for teaching, educating, loving and living differently. (shrink)