This might be of interest…
From: Solga
mailing list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Adi
Kuntsman
Sent: 03 March 2009 09:44
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: CFP: AAA panel on queer necropolitics
Dear SOLGAns,
I am putting together a SOLGA panel on queer necropolitics (details below). If
you would like to take part, please send your abstracts by 20 March to [log in to unmask]
best wishes
Adi
*Queer necropolitics: lives, deaths and the
end(s) of queer anthropology*
The topic of death is far from new to gay and lesbian anthropologists. However,
recent developments in Western queer politics suggest an important political
shift from those queers who are left to die (through HIV/AIDs or denial of
reproduction and parenting), to queers that reproduce life (Puar 2007). Yet,
not all queers are ‘fostered for living’; just as only some queer deaths are
constituted grievable (Butler 2004). When looking at the simultaneous expansion
of liberal gay politics and its complicity within the US ‘war on terror’,
Jasbir Puar calls our attention to the ‘differences between queer subjects who
are being folded (back) into life and the racialised queernesses that emerge
through the naming of populations’, often those marked for death (2007:
36.). Inspired by Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics – a concept
he develops when analysing subalternity, race and war and terror (Mbembe 2003)
– and by Puar’s insightful notion of queer necropolitics, this panel seeks to
explore the relations between queerness and war, immigration, colonisation,
imprisonment and other forms of population control. At the time of military
invasions, colonial struggles and the simultaneously globalised and
nationalised ‘wars on terror’, what is the place of queerness in formations of
race, nation and citizenship? What are the practices – institutional,
discursive, affective – through which some queers are ‘disciplined into
subjecthood, narrated into population, and fostered for living’ (Puar 2007: 36)
while others are regulated through death? What are the responsibilities of
producing anthropological knowledge about sexuality in contexts where such knowledge
is repeatedly mobilised by military strategists and colonial entrepreneurs? And
what is the role of queer anthropology in conceptualising the dangerous
alliances that are often formed between right-wing patriotism and the discourse
of GLBT rights? Speakers are invited to reflect on these and related questions
and address topics such as regimes of grievability in formations of queer
subjects; queer colonialities; ethnographic accounts of the relations between
queer lives and deaths; and racialisation of queer politics at the times of the
‘war on terror’.
--
Dr. Adi Kuntsman
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures
The University of Manchester
Second Floor, Arthur Lewis Building, room 2.007
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/ricc/index.html
http://adi.kuntsman.googlepages.com