Call for papers

Call for papers

Call for paper proposals for the AAA panel (via SOLGA).
Please send your abstracts by 20 March to adi.kuntsman (arroba) manchester.ac.uk

*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

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