ABSTRACT
This collection came together as a result of several years of thinking collaboratively through the intersection of gender, sexuality, violence and precariousness. In particular, the book attends to the changes in queer politics that emerge in contemporary regimes of racism, neo/colonialism, ‘war on terror’, incarceration, border enforcement and neoliberalism. In the place of simple dichotomies of repression versus visibility, or oppression versus rights, chapters in this collection complicate dominant understandings of the political by interrogating the ways in which sexual difference is increasingly absorbed into hegemonic apparatuses, in a way that accelerates premature death (Gilmore 2007) for those who are unassimilable in liberal regimes of rights and representation and thus become disposable. Moving from highly visible and ritualized performances of public grief to killing and abandonment of sexually or racially marked subjects and populations; from warfare in the name of queerness and other forms of sexual exceptionalism to queer lives as ‘bare lives’ (Agamben 1998); and from military funerals to sexualized warzones and zones of abandonment, we ask: What new techniques of governance can be mapped in a context of power which increasingly speaks the language of women's, gay and transgender rights, protection and diversity? What challenges arise from these complicities and convergences, and how are they best addressed? In feminist discussions, there has long been an engagement with the question of complicity, most recently around the institutionalization of anti-violence movements (Incite! 2006) and the role of women's rights discourses in the ‘war on terror’ (e.g. Bacchetta et al. 2002; Thobani 2002). These contestations are largely indebted to intersectional critiques, especially by women of colour, migrant feminists and indigenous feminists. In queer theorizing, debates over the place of rights discourses in regimes of border fortification, militarization and incarceration have arrived belatedly, to collide with a context of LGBT politics and sexuality studies which, especially in Europe, lacks any serious engagement with racism, coloniality, positionality and intersectionality (but see Ahmed 2011; Bacchetta 2010; El-Tayeb 2012; Eng, Halberstam and Muñoz 2005; Ferguson 2003; Jivraj and de Jong 2011; Manalansan 2003; Petzen 2012; Reddy 2011; Tauqir et al. 2011).
