1st Edition
Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics Feminist and Queer Interventions
The concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics have increasingly gained scholarly attention, particularly in light of today’s urgent and troubling issues that mark some lives as more – or less – worthy than others, including the migration crisis, rise of populism on a global scale, homonationalist practices, and state-sanctioned targeting of gender, sexual, racial, and ethnic ‘others’. This book aims to nuance this conversation by emphasising feminist and queer investments and interventions and by adding the analytical lens of cosmopolitics to ongoing debates around life/living and death/dying in the current political climate. In this way, we move forward toward envisioning feminist and queer futures that rethink categories such as ‘human’ and ‘subjectivity’ based on classical modern premises.
Informed by feminist/queer studies, postcolonial theory, cultural analysis, and critical posthumanism, Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics engages with longstanding questions of biopolitics and necropolitics in an era of neoliberalism and late capitalism, but does so by urging for a more inclusive (and less violent) cosmopolitical framework. Taking account of these global dynamics that are shaped by asymmetrical power relations, this fruitful posthuman(ist) and post-/decolonial approach allows for visions of transformation of the matrix of in-/exclusion into feminist/queer futures that work towards planetary social justice.
This book is a significant new contribution to feminist and queer philosophy and politics, and will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced students of gender studies, postcolonial studies, sociology, philosophy, politics, and law.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Gender Studies.
Introduction: Biopolitics, necropolitics, cosmopolitics – feminist and queer interventions
C.L. Quinan and Kathrin Thiele
1. The biopolitics of languaging in the cybernetic fold: a decolonial and queer ear to the cosmo-poetics
Hyaesin Yoon
2. Healing ecology in Aurora Levins Morales's writings on environmental illness
(Brena) Yu-Chen Tai
3. A Matter of lies and death – Necropolitics and the question of engagement with the aftermath of Rwanda’s Genocide
Dorothee Hölscher, Consolée Kanamugire and Hyacinth Udah
4. Bio/diversity and its deadly underside: making killable in times of emergency
Eike Marten
5. Forest futures: biopolitics, purity, and extinction in Europe’s last ‘pristine’ forest
Olga Cielemęcka
6. Queer life-worlds and the art of David Wojnarowicz
Tomasz Sikora
7. What can homonationalism tell us about sexuality in South Africa?: Exploring the relationships between biopolitics, necropolitics, sexual exceptionalism and homonormativity
Andrew Tucker
8. The many lives of fungibility: anti-blackness in neoliberal times
Shannon Winnubst
Biography
C.L. Quinan is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Utrecht University. Quinan’s research interests include trans studies, queer theory, and postcolonial studies, with work on gender, surveillance, and securitization appearing in numerous journals and edited volumes. Quinan’s first book is entitled Hybrid Anxieties: Queering the French-Algerian War and its Postcolonial Legacies (2020).
Kathrin Thiele is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory at Utrecht University. Her research intervenes into contemporary debates around systemic in-/equalities, de-/coloniality, and (new) materialism/(post)humanisms. She has published widely on these questions. Thiele is also Founder of the international research network Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network of the Critical Humanities (www.terracritica.net).
