by Yana Sitnikova
LGBT issues in Russia receive a lot of attention from the media worldwide. However not all groups that are included in LGBT, or even broader LGBTQI, abbreviation are covered equally. While problems faced by Russian lesbian and gay people are considered in detail, queer, bisexual, transgender and intersex issues remain almost invisible. This article is aimed at filling this gap by describing the situation that Russian trans* people live in and our struggle as trans* activists.
by Erel, Umut; Haritaworn, Jin; Rodríguez, Encarnación Gutiérrez and Klesse, Christian
Queer theory ofers itself as a radical epistemology to uncover pervasive forms of power, not only around sexuality but also around ‘race’ and transgender. Queer of colour theorists and some trans theorists have re- mained sceptical about these grand claims, and pointed out the notorious silence about racism and transphobia in the mainstream of queer theorising (Helen (charles) 1993, Cathy Cohen 2001, Jin Haritaworn 2007). Their critique echoes an older tradition of theorising multiple relations of oppression that has been particularly advocated by lesbians of colour like Audre Lorde (1984), Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith (1982; 1983). While the anti-racist feminisms of the 1980s have produced their own silences, especially around transgender and dissident sexualities, we will here argue that their call to positionality is vital in developing a queer theory and research practice that addresses the silences around raciality subject to this volume. This article is an attempt to ind a language for our dissatisfaction with the silencing of the knowledge productions and political activisms of trans people of colour, queers of colour, women of colour and migrant women in the UK and Germany, as at the same time it is about exploring the possibilities and limits of the concept of ‘intersectionality‘. In nearly two decades of critical debate about how multiple oppressions around gender, ‘race‘ and class interlock, ‘intersectionality‘ has emerged as a concept which promises a comprehensive theorising of various power relations. In this article we explore the potential of an ‘intersectionality perspective‘ for critical queer theorising and research practice. We argue that the concept has been used as an umbrella term for divergent debates and political projects, both radical and hegemonic ones. This is relected in its reception and dissemination in diferent political, cultural and historical contexts.
Jill Lane, Marcial Godoy-Anativia and Macarena Gómez Barris
Volume 11 | Issue 1 | 2014
Decolonial gesture is: cuir. Transfeminist, Postpornographic. The textual shift from queer to cuir is, says Sayak Valencia, a gesture of “sexual dissidence and its geopolitical and epistemic displacement toward the south.” Decolonial gesture is: CUIR FAT POWER! with artist Alejandra Rodríguez, aka La Bala. It is Post-sexual with artist Katia Sepúlveda, whose 2007 work of that name offers a silicone dildo in a frypan, melting very slowly over low heat. The challenge to patriarchy pictured is both radical and glacial: the image of the upright penis melting on a frypan—a place of feminized domesticity par excellence—images the demise of patriarchy and also insists on the very slow, continuous process of social change. Its praxis as image is confrontational, oppositional: a bold portrait of feminism’s threat to patriarchy. Its praxis as durational performance is transformative: over time, the antagonism between patriarchy and transfeminism dissolves.
Decolonial gesture is, then, ¡transmarikaputabollomestizxmigranteprecarix!
[…]
Aquest dissabte, en el marc de la jornada del primer aniversari del desallotjament de la nau del carrer Puigcerdà, que va celebrar-se al nou Espai de l’Immigrant del barri del Raval de Barcelona, es va presentarl’informe “Vulneracions de drets humans a la frontera sud- Melilla”. Aquest informe, elaborat per la Comissió d’Observadores de Drets Humans (CODH), posa fi a un projecte que va tenir el seu origen a la segona trobada Frontera Sud Melilla i Drets Humans, duta a terme a Melilla del 2 al 6 de juliol. La comissió ha estat formada per membres de la Campanya Estatal pel Tancament dels CIEs, la Coordinadora Estatal per la Prevenció i Denúncia de la Tortura (CPDT), el Grup d’Acció Comunitària (GAC) i l’Observatori del Sistema Penal i els Drets Humans de la Universitat de Barcelona (OSPDH). L’informe, dividit en cinc àrees temàtiques, pretén posar llum a la fosca situació dels drets humans que es viu a la ciutat fronterera de Melilla. Després de la introducció feta per Ana Fornés, membre de la CODH, per explicar la fonamentació i la metodologia emprades per elaborar l’informe, la resta de membres de la comissió va exposar les diferents àrees […]
by Achille Mbembe
The utopian ideal of a world free of the burden of race has powered the struggles of the oppressed since the advent of the modern age. It gave meaning and purpose to the campaigns for the abolition of slavery in the 19th century. It was central to the decolonisation struggle, the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and some of the radical attempts to change the world in the 20th century.
As racism has kept mutating, though, so have forms of intersections between race, class and gender. Although local in its manifestations, racism has always been a global phenomenon and part of its persistence is a result of its globalisation. Furthermore, the force of racism in our world stems from its capacity to mutate and to reappear constantly in ever-changing forms in the most unexpected sites of everyday life.
The weakness of most antiracist struggles is the result of our inability to keep up with the mutating structures of racism and their virulence. As racism worldwide takes on a genomic turn and is now propelled by the war on terror, various anti-migratory policies, the resurgence of compensatory forms of nationalism and mass incarceration, South Africa is caught between various contradictory processes. […]
by David Theo Goldberg
In the age of the post-racial – of colourblindness and post-apartheid, an Obama presidency and majority rule – racist expression continues to proliferate. How is it that citizens of modern states, sometimes as agents of the state themselves, so readily engage in racist expression and practice?
One response is this, inspired by Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the Eichmann trial: racisms constitute thoughtlessness in the Arendtian sense of failing to exercise (self-)reflective critical judgment.
Those expressing themselves in racist ways and engaging in racist acts lack critical and indeed self-critical imagination, refusing or failing to take account of the other as having equal standing; they are an ignorant or arrogant refusal to consider conditions beyond one’s own.
Racisms, it could be said, are narcissisms: nihilistic self-regard of especially extreme kinds.
There is, to follow Arendt’s line, a banality to much racism, the shocking ordinariness of its everyday occurrences and the ordinariness with which its culture of shock has come to be received, to the point of oversight, neglect, a shrug. The shocking quality is buried in the ordinary, everyday, unresisting acceptance of the reduction of people to data points in the schedule of instrumental operation.[…]
Seminario abierto de Walter Mignolo
2.6.-4.6.2014, Auditorio del MACBA
En “Activar los archivos, descentralizar a las musas” Mignolo hace una lectura del Museo de Arte Islámico (Doha) y del Museo de las Civilizaciones Asiáticas (Singapur), buscando descolonizar la historia única de los museos occidentales y mostrando de qué modo funciona la desoccidentalización. El autor recurre a la historia decolonial de los museos occidentales a través de la apropiación del modelo museístico en el Sur y el Oriente globales.
Este Quadern portàtil se publica con motivo del seminario “El descontento y la promesa. Colonialidad, modernidad y epistemologias descoloniales” impartido por Walter Mignolo en el contexto del PEI (Programa de estudios independientes) del MACBA, en junio de 2014.
A JCRT Special Edition, Winter 2014
Edited by Nikolay Karkov and Jeffrey W. Robbins
The attentive reader might ask: why a special issue on decoloniality and crisis? What is decoloniality, what do we mean by crisis, and why pair them together? The reason is simple (at least in our eyes): we see decoloniality and crisis as arguably the two key terms/processes/realities of our new millennium, which, tellingly, seem to have to come to fruition at roughly the same time. Just as the new century, certainly post-9/11, was starting to move away from the rhetoric of the “end of history” to one of a “clash of civilizations,” of permanent instability and conflict (i.e. crisis), so also an explicitly decolonial perspective was starting to gain ground, at least among radical academics and activists, primarily in the U.S., the Caribbean, and Latin America. The near simultaneous emergence of (in Walter Mignolo’s words) a “grammar of decoloniality” and (a new sense and dimensions of) crisis needs to give us a pause. Perhaps reading them side by side can be mutually illuminating, as in a sort of dialectic, whereby the mutual confrontation of the two realities adds further layers of complexity to each one […]
DEMOCRACY AND REVOLUTION, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2014
Edited by Henrik Jøker Bjerre & Agon Hamza
The first issue of the philosophical journal Crisis and Critique is now available. The first issue deals with Democracy and Revolutions. It is available online in PDF format:
http://materializmidialektik.org/crisis-and-critique/
We live in the time of crisis, even a double crisis: a crisis of the Left or Marxism, and a crisis of the capitalist mode of production itself. That is to say, on top of our list of current uncertainties – ideological, political and economic, we should add ‘theoretical’. We do not have a theory of the present. In this regard, the aim of this journal is to critically examine and comprehend not only the existing conjunctures, but also the possibilities of reinventing the idea of radical emancipation, under the name of Communism.
by Vulcanita Erupziono
“In the belly of fascism” is a trans-disciplinary project that deals with the intersection between Italian historical colonialism and today’s racism in contemporary Italy. The aim is to analyze critically the present Italian colonial matrix of power through the thinking and critical engagement of those who have the status of migrant cultural workers, including the so-called “second generation” migrants, that are precise regarding their post-colonial background, in order to acquire a non-Eurocentric genealogy of our European history.
http://nelventredelfascismo.noblogs.org/
