Provost 3/1/2017 Jasbir K. Puar

Week 8

In this week’s set of readings the authors of the articles and chapters that we’ve read are forcing us to confront what queer and queerness mean, in many contexts.  Specifically asking the reader to confront ideas about sexuality, empire and a subjectless critique.

The concepts brought forth by this week’s readings, help us meditate on this idea of a subjectless critique and how that lends a framework for understanding how colonial hierarchies are created and re-created in spaces where our intentions may be to decolonize, like research.

This was particularly useful for thinking about the concept of intersectionality once again, especially as it becomes (more) co-opted by mainstream, white feminism.  As Puar points out to us when she writes “intersectionality demands the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time, generating narratives of progress that deny the fictive and performative identification: you become an identity, yes, but also timelessness works to consolidate the fiction of a seamless stable identity in every space”(Puar, 2005, 128). This points us back to a concept that is often used in the justification of more inclusive and culturally responsive research practices, and what the implications are.

Puar brings our attention to this idea through the example of LGBT identity and Muslim identities by saying “through the insistent and frantic manufacturing of “homosexuality” and “Muslim” as mutually exclusive discrete categories, queerness colludes with the delineation of exceptional U.S. sexual norms produced against the intolerable forms of the sexualities of “terrorist” bodies (Puar, 2005, 126). Puar allows us to understand how to queer our perspectives of a topic and understand that it is not the critique of a single population or person, but the manufacturing and perpetuation of these colonialist, ideas.

This has been particularly useful to explore when juxtaposed with the Women of Color Methodologies that we’ve just explore, specifically thinking about the ways in which we can imagine using a subjectless critique from queer theory to explore the topics that Audra Simpson discusses in her book. For example, being conscious of the work that we are producing in our attempts for decolonization. When thinking about this theory and these concepts in relation to my own work, it is something that I maintain consciousness with young people.

1)    What interventions can we create for ourselves to stay aware of the dangers or traps of co-opting and re-colonizing projects of decolonization? More specifically, what does this mean for deconstructing the inescapable power dynamics in research?