Feral Feminisms (Web); guest edited by Amy Verhaeghe

Proposals by: 15.01.2020

„The problem with empire is that it’s incredibly devious and always finds ways to absorb our struggles and incorporate them as part of its project of domination. We just have to remain careful and continue organizing. Resisting pinkwashing and homonationalism isn’t actually just about producing academic theory, more tangibly it’s about: supporting survivors of state violence, ending prisons and detention centers, helping queer and trans people find affordable housing and shelter. The best forms of resistance are in the actual work on the ground to keep people alive.“ Janani Balasubramanian and Alok Vaid-Menon, 2015

Feral Feminisms, a peer-reviewed, and open access online journal, invites submissions from artists, activists, and scholars for a special issue titled, “Transnationalizing Homonationalism”. The issue will explore transnational approaches to theorizing, visualizing, and producing knowledge about homonationalism.

US sexual exceptionalism, along with the ascendency of whiteness and queerness as regulatory, is a central underpinning of Jasbir Puar’s (2007) formulation of homonationalism. Yet Puar’s conceptualization of US sexual exceptionalism is inherently transnational; she conceptualizes US sexual exceptionalism as a formation that constructs the US as an “exceptional nation-state” which is both unlike and superior to other nation-states while simultaneously facilitating the United States’ production of “states of exception” (2007, 3). Puar argues that “deployments of homonationalism … bolster the nation” by invigorating “a transnational discourse of U.S. sexual exceptionalism vis-à-vis perversely racialized bodies of pathologized sexualities (both inside and outside U.S. borders)” (2007, 51). As such, neither homonationalism nor  … read more (Web).