Out of time: the queer politics of postcoloniality

2022 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 320-321
Author(s):  
Joseph Hills
Keyword(s):  
1994 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 81-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha A. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  

Hypatia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 715-730 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunera Thobani

In the volatile conflicts that inaugurated the twenty‐first century, secularism, democracy, and freedom were identified by Western nation‐states as symbolizing their civilizational values, in contrast to the fanaticism, misogyny, and homophobia they attributed to “Islam.” The figure of the Muslim was thus transformed into an existential threat. This paper analyzes an exchange among scholars—Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech—that engages these highly contested issues. As such, the text provides a rare opportunity to study how particular significations of the West, its epistemological tradition, and its relation with Islam are contested and negotiated in a critically engaged site during a moment of global crisis. My reading of the text leads me to argue that the stabilization of the epistemic power of the West is presently reliant on a new iteration of its foundational philosophical concepts to suppress counter‐hegemonic narratives that foreground its forms of violence. Further, the terrain for this reshaping of the dominance of this tradition is gender/sexuality, such that queer politics are located at the forefront of the Western politico‐philosophical project. As such, the advancement of this tradition is co‐constitutive with that of the gendered‐sexual subject as emblematic of its highest civilizational values.


Author(s):  
Antke Engel

The critique of identity politics has opened up a sceptical attitude towards normative categories and demands for the coherence and stability of sex, gender and sexuality. At the same time reflections on mechanisms of exclusion within emancipatory movements and politics have also gained attention. Thus, not only (hetero-)sexism and homophobia, but also discriminations pertaining to the rigid binary gender order as well as racist discrimination are issues of importance to queer politics. Considering the critique of identity or minority politics, I have come to the conclusion that rather than to proliferate or to dissolve categories of sex, gender and sexuality, it is more promising to render them ambiguous: that is what I call a queer strategy of equivocation. Nevertheless sexual ambiguity is not progressive or liberating in itself. Instead, we have to realize that queer/feminist struggles against normative identities, a destabilization of binary, heterosexual norms or new forms of gendered or sexual existence are quite compatible with the quest for individualization put forth by neo-liberal forms of domination. Therefore, a strategy of equivocation should include the fight against social hierarchies, inequalities, and normalizations. The task is to consider simultaneously the working of and the intervention into different mechanisms of power; normalizations and hierarchizations, inclusions and exclusions work together, but not always in the same direction or without contradictions.


2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 1217-1230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nishant Shahani
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Emily K. Hobson

Although AIDS direct action is generally described as beginning with ACT UP, it first developed as activists drew tactics and ideas from Central American solidarity and the anti-nuclear movement. Anti-militarism catalyzed AIDS direct action in the Bay Area; its influences appeared in 1984, took on force in 1986, and by 1987 shaped national networks of AIDS activism. The groups Citizens for Medical Justice and the AIDS Action Pledge paved the way for the formation of ACT UP/San Francisco and Stop AIDS Now Or Else. AIDS direct action stood as the culmination of the gay and lesbian left even as it marked the start of a new queer politics. However, these radical genealogies were obscured with the deaths of many activists.


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