Decolonial-Queerness & Abolition in SWAN

This reading-intensive seminar course will examine the continuing impact, since 1492, of a (neo)colonial/(neo)imperial Euro-American informed modernity animated by (neo)liberal-Enlightenment values (free will/humanity, secularism, racial capitalism) and individualist identity politics on past and contemporary conceptualizations of family, kinship, and friendship in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities within the context of settler-colonial societies (as the U.S./Canada) as well as in postcolonial nations and regions (as Southwest Asia, Africa, and the Middle East) that arguably never underwent adequate decolonization. The course will explore kinship, intimacy, and friendship ties in a dynamic age where sexual and gender diversity is a hallmark of neoliberal ‘secular’ modernity, whose advent historically exposed all non-Europeans, to a plethora of false competing dualisms, such as secular/religious and heterogeneity/homogeneity, as well as discourses such as homonationalism (al-qawmiyyat al-mīthlīyat) and pinkwashing (al-ghaseel al-banafsajiy). We will examine selected themes such as racialized gender (including masculinities), sexuality, intimacy, class, age, power relationships, and their intersections. By drawing on transnational feminist discourses, queer Black, and Indigenous studies as well as queer of color critiques we will explore different manifestations of intimacy, familial, marriage, and friendship ties. What can friendship patterns - intimate, trustful, as well as voluntarily chosen ties that people maintain - tell us about societies and communal solidarities at present amidst polarizing ‘woke cultural wars?’ What role do geopolitical and social institutions and agency beyond them play when thinking about the violence of global nation-statist and racial capitalist gendered/sexualized systematic and systemic structures and what they provoke of reactionary Orientalist/Conservative impulses? Using intersectional/assemblage-based theories, what decolonial, gender- based, readings and formulations of feminisms/queerness exist that evade the apparent tidiness of European feminist and narrow LGBTIQA categories that characterizes most (non)Euro-American political queer- feminist scholarship beyond the depiction of queer BIPOC as co-opted and duped, colonized pawns of ‘Gay Empire’ towards elucidating critical discussions on identity, agency, subjectivity, and dissidence?  In our durée together students will expl