Description
This talk inquires into the possibilities of identifying common politics amongst minoritised queer communities internationally in the face of the inability of the analytic of homonationalism to fully capture contemporary violence against trans and queer people. While fascist and other right-wing authoritarian movements draw on homonationalist politics – stirring up fears of dangerous and/or conservative racialised ‘Others’ who threaten sexual freedom – these movements increasingly position themselves in opposition to LGBT rights, enshrine racial conceptions of the heterosexual nuclear family as the backbone of the nation, and recement a naturalised, often colonial, gender/sex binary. This paper takes the concept of ‘queer anti-fascism’ to think through and against these transnational mobilisations. While many anti-authoritarian queer movements have adopted the terminology of fascism and anti-fascism, others remain skeptical of this vocabulary and the historical weight it carries. Thinking across Germany, Brazil and India, this paper discusses what analyses and forms of resistance an anti-fascist queer perspective allow us to imagine and enact and critically investigates to what extent queer anti-fascism can work as a useful framework for understanding the historical present without recentering Eurocentric perspectives on the violence of modernity.
