Description
Over the past four decades, just as capitalist power was being projected on an unprecedented scale across all corners of the planet, (postcolonial and decolonial) feminist and queer epistemologies were simultaneously mandating an emphasis on contingency, singularity, difference, discontinuity, and exception. This mandate has taken two seemingly divergent forms: an imperative to scale down to the intimate, the everyday, and the embodied, on the one hand, and to scale up to the many worlds of the pluriverse, on the other. Both these forms, we argue, tend towards ontologization and prove inadequate to the task of grasping the global relations that underpin the polysemic crises of the present global order.
These two tendencies converge in their rejection of thinking in ways that are seen as totalizing. By dismissing totality thinking as totalitarian; an attempt to violently impose a universal truth on the particularities of human experience, however, feminists have left us ill-equipped to address the totalizing systems of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism that organize our lives across the various scales, spheres, and divides of modernity. In this paper, we return to ‘totality’ as a useful methodological device that maintains the dialectical movement between the abstract and the concrete, the micro and the macro, the private and the political, and the local and the global. We especially draw on recent developments in transfeminist writings to demonstrate its analytical and political purchase for postcolonial feminist and queer theorizing today.
