Description
In the 2020 Social Text special issue introduction “Left of queer”, Jasbir Puar and David Eng remind us that “the radical potential of queer critique has often turned on its analyses of gender and sex as ‘racial arrangements’” (2). In agreement, this roundtable calls for a (re)centring of questions of empire, race and (settler)coloniality in our study of gender and sexuality, to appraise how they act as sites where violent racial formations are created, maintained, but also contested. This roundtable asks, how can “what’s left of queer” in IR fundamentally challenge the ongoing violent (racial, colonial) projects of transnational security regimes, nation-state(s), empire, racial capitalism? How can it address the ongoing coloniality of our present, and help us push back against both global fascisms and the murderous inclusions pedalled under “liberal democracy”? How can it ground us in material, lived realities, and defy abstraction and “mystification” (Stoffel & Birkvad 2023)? What new/old/unconsidered objects, subjects and sites of study should our queer feminist critique attend to? These questions will be accompanied by reflections on the production of “queer knowledge” in the academy: What are its material conditions? Who is it for? And how do our different positionalities and personal investments drive our employment of “queer” as an analytic? Attending to these questions, this roundtable seeks to carve out a space for us to take stock of our queer feminist critique and figure out its place and potential in the joint struggle against fascism, genocide, empire, white supremacy and settler-colonialism.
