Call for Papers:

Murderous inclusions:

International Feminist

Journal of Politics

by Sokari on February 10, 2012

Call for Papers: Murderous inclusions special issue

Guest editors:

Jin Haritaworn, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Adi Kuntsman, The University of Manchester 

Silvia Posocco, Birkbeck, University of London

Sexual citizenship is usually examined though the lens of inclusion – into rights, legal and political subjecthood – through sexuality. What has received less scholarly attention is the problem of inclusion itself, and its costs. Instead of focusing on the inclusion and incorporation of sexual minorities as a certain pathway to progressive politics, this special issue explores inclusions that are murderous: it aspires to decouple the link between inclusion, queer politics and justice. The special issue seeks to critically examine parameters of sexual citizenship that accompany – or work hand in hand with – violent regimes of coloniality, ‘wars on terror’, ‘development’ and structural adjustment, criminalisation, pathologisation, border enforcement and neoliberalism. What new techniques of governance can be mapped in a context of power which increasingly speaks the language of sexual and gender rights, protection and diversity? What challenges arise from these complicities and convergences of queer inclusions, and how are they best addressed? What are the spaces of difference between situated and ever shifting regimes of legal regulation, and the ethical domain of queer politics and justice?

In examining the deadly logic of inclusion into (some) modes of queer citizenship, this special issue turns to the notion of ‘queer necropolitics’ to critically interrogate the political formations of both sexuality and inclusion itself. Moving away from the narrow focus of sexual citizenship as coterminous with ‘rights’, and from the idea of inclusion as positive and desirable, it attempts to create space for new kinds of feminist and queer politics that are not premised on more death. Informed by Achille Mbembe’s concept of ‘necropolitics’ – a concept he develops when analysing the centrality of death in subalternity, race and war and terror (Mbembe 2003) – by Puar’s insightful elaboration of ‘queer necropolitics’ (Puar 2007), and by broader debates on deadly formations of sovereign power, we invite contributions to reflect on topics such as the following:

 

• Rethinking sexual citizenship: who is envisioned as worthy of inclusion, and what are thecosts?

• Theoretical and analytical challenges to account for the relations between sexuality, violence and the constitution of ‘community’, ‘neighbourhood’, or ‘nation’ through a specific focus on processes of inclusion.

• Queer necropolitics and the ‘wars without end’ (Mbembe 2003:23): regimes of policing, border control, colonial conflict or the ‘war on terror’; militarised intimacies, the militarisation of urban spaces and queer and trans communities in the name of safety and security.

• LGBT identitarian claims to sovereignty, rights and protection, acquisitive forms of sociality and assimilationist logics, and their intersection with ongoing histories of settler colonialism, genocide and slavery.

• Analyses of the articulation of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’ through ‘immunitarian dialectics’ (Esposito 2008) that strengthen sovereign power to immunise the community against the prospect of conflict; discussions of the implications of these processes and the instantiation of collectivities through ‘immunitarian apparatuses’ which allow a range of gendered, racialised and sexualised Others to exist in segregated proximity, as ‘the outside of the inside’ (Esposito 2008:8), through processes of introjections of negativity geared towards the preservation of life.

• Queer necropolitics and international relations: the inclusion of homosexuals in state militaries, the heteronormativity of the international relations of weapon production, the deployment and tying of ‘queer’ development aid, and other forms gay imperialism.

• Queer necropolitics, migration and citizenship: the problematic of conditioning asylum and citizenship testing on exceptionalist regimes of gender and sexuality.
  

Queer necropolitics and the turn to race/religion, intersectionality and the Global South in Northern LGBT theorizing and organizing.

Queer necropolitics and the prison, medical and non-profit industrial sectors: prison abolitionist critiques of the hate crime model, anti-psychiatry critiques of the biomedicalization of homo/transphobia, bio/necropolitical accounts of subaltern queer and (especially) trans death as a form of value extraction; the biopolitics, necropolitics and geopolitics of global gay, LGBT and trans movements.

Queer necropolitics and violence, including war, Occupation, policing, borders, gentrification and the prison and medical industrial complexes; the relationship between queer liberalism, violence and backlash; queer, feminist and transgender anti-violence organizing by indigenous people, people of colour, migrants and people in the Global South.

We invite contributions looking at the relations between contemporary queer politics, indigeneity, antiblackness, Islamophobia, increasingly militarised and nationalist forms of sexual citizenship, immunised and segregating forms of sociality and intimacy, and deadly forms of inclusion into legal, political and sexual subjecthood. We are particularly interested in contributions with a wide geopolitical representation, dealing with global regions such as Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe within a transnational framework, and welcome submissions from junior scholars. We also especially welcome submissions from writers who are queer/trans of colour, indigenous, migrant or from the Global South.

Prospective authors should submit their articles to ifjp @ ufl.edu by 1 August 2012. Articles should be between 5000 and 8000 words. Please follow the journal house-style and supply a biographical note, an abstract and contact information with your submission . Submissions will be anonymously refereed by at least two reviewers. Papers will then be reviewed and a final selection chosen for publication in International Feminist Journal of Politics, Volume 15, Issue 4, due out in late 2013. Articles will be published on IFjP’s FirstView online publishing service approximately two months after the receipt of the final version.