Editors: Churnjeet Mahn, Yvette Taylor, and Matt Brim
Proposals by: 16.10.2020
The editors invite submissions for an edited collection on redistributing resources with, as well as via, queer studies. Queering Sharing: Toward the Redistribution of Resources around the University aims to gather writing from across academic tiers and global contexts, and from emerging and established scholars, to make a significant contribution to the understanding of queer theory’s class politics in the university. We particularly welcome chapters that draw on feminist, decolonial and anti-racist intellectual traditions to create space for discussions of class in queer studies.
A number of contexts and tensions set the stage for this volume. If queer theory has been a major intellectual driver of liberatory politics in the university, and has benefitted (in terms of course offerings, degree programs and posts) from the strategic disinvestment in feminism in the academy, it has not been successful in challenging the increasing marketisation and capitalist instincts of higher education. With the stark inequalities in access to university in the US, where the ‚tyranny of selectivity‘ (Davidson 2017) and long doctoral programs guarantee that a degree of personal wealth and/or educational privilege is a prerequisite for a ‚good‘ education, does the intellectual pursuit of queer theory have a built-in class barrier? If not, where and how does the integration of queer theory not only counter institutional thinking but produce anti-racist, anti-classist structural reorganizations around questions of access, material support, and lived academic experience?
By raising such questions, we hope to show the uneven and unexpected ways in which anti-poor financial university logics have impacted the practice and teaching of queer theory, and what a queer redistribution of resources might look, feel and act like, as ‚queer sharing‘. To engage in ‚queer sharing‘ involves a reckoning of the classing climate in, by and through university systems. Such reckonings have found space in academia through forums including Our Working Class Lives and, more recently, the UK Working Class Academics conference in July 2020 (Web).
COVID-19 has brought questions of class, race, and activism for queers into sharp relief, with a Continue reading