ABSTRACT

The author first came across Paola Bacchetta's work when reading the forerunning collective statement "Transnational Feminist Practices against War" circulated in 2001. Much of what we are trying to do seems to be a translation of earlier feminist struggles around positionality and coalition politics, as well as an attempt to learn from the hard lessons of complicity, backlash and institutionalisation. What we need is a decolonisation of sexual and trans/gender theory and politics along earlier feminist lines. She has worked with feminist, queer, anti-racism, pro-immigration and anti-neocolonialism movements in the USA, France and Italy, and in India with feminist, queer and anti-right-wing movements. Her relationship to the transatlantic is complex, too. She is a multiply racialised, mixed lesbian with a genealogy in four sites: Venezuela, Italy, Turkey and Northeast Africa. Homonationalism, the term coined by Puar to describe the convergences and complicities between homonormative and nationalist projects.