Queer, feminist, de/postcolonial, science

Perhaps living as we are in a breathtakingly violent and violently fast-paced world, it might be helpful to think through efforts to know and comprehend this world from a queer, feminist, de/postcolonial perspective. These are projects that inspire us to take a pause to look up and around and ask: did I remember to breathe today? Did I somehow manage to live as a free subject today, and did this intersect with others being able to also breathe and live as free subjects? Did science help with this, or get in the way, or – worse – cause this strange, violent world that is passing through our eyes?

In this issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFJP), we encounter a range of recent research that variously answers these questions and helps to identify the pauses that queer, feminist, and de/postcolonial concepts and methods create in and through science. As Lídia Cabral writes in this issue, science is never neutral and largely reflects “hierarchies of knowledge associated with patriarchal logics of domination.” Bringing this feminist insight into conversation with queer, de/postcolonial, and fat and disabilities studies, we also know that patriarchal logics do not work alone. Logics of domination importantly manifest through naturalized equivocations of “rationality” with not only masculine-coded but also white and other privileged norm-coded logics according to which, for example, “fat is irreconcilable with personhood” (Farrell 2021, 47, emphasis in original). In short, the problem of science and knowledge hierarchies is intricately linked to issues of academic form and to the way in which “excess fat” is trimmed and lean, clean, orderly thinking is privileged.

All of the articles in this issue, as in every issue of IFJP, have theoretical and conceptual discussions that frame the “empirics” (whether those are discourses, documents, life histories, stories, and so on) and methodology discussions that explain the approaches and methods used to extract the “empirics” from the chosen sources. They systematically analyze the empirical world and the data extracted from their sources, thereby organizing them under themes or lines of argumentations developed through the theories and concepts that the researchers set out at the beginning. In this way, academic theories and concepts – that is, academic debates and discussions in academic language that academics, if they are plugged into these debates and discussions, can understand and appreciate – shape the overall form and feel of the research. At first glance, what makes science science is the expertise with which a researcher navigates academic conventions. What reading these articles together helps to make visible is how we get closer to scientific knowledge that haunts our conscience when the research tries to break (from) this seemingly uniform and settled mold and works in the spaces that the commas create between “queer,” “feminist,” “de/postcolonial,” and “science.”

The issue starts off with Caitlin Biddolph’s article “Haunting Justice: Queer Bodies, Ghosts, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,” the winner of the 2022 Enloe Award. Biddolph defines “queer” as a term that helps to “resist static, homogenizing identity formations” and is “open to the diverse ways in which people live.” With this definition, she uses a queer hauntological approach to make visible absent queer lives and deaths in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Her point is that cisheteronormative legal subjectivity creates this absence, and she opens and ends this imaginative but also largely “scientific” examination with reference to Kvir Arhiv, a small but important collection of queer Bosnian testimonies, to illustrate “the possibilities that come with centering queer voices.”

Olimpia Burchiellaro uses a similar strategy to break open the enclosed site of her ethnographic study of queer tourism in Argentina and also to compensate for what the scientific method of ethnographic research would not and could not bring into view. She adopts the concept of “homocapitalism” to make sense of the various encounters in the gay nightclubs and bars of Buenos Aires, and also the discourse generated by the Gnetwork360 conference that brought together global corporations, tourism authorities, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) organizations. Similar to Biddolph, she points to the Argentinian documentary Putos Peronistas to illustrate alternative queer mobilities and futures articulated from the rural peripheries that upend the homocapitalist notions of liberation and progress found in the city center.

In relation to these two articles, Carl Death’s study of three Afrofuturist short stories appears productive, not only because they are African fiction from the “periphery,” but also because short stories’ brevity and availability outside overly commodified channels make them, in Helen Kapstein’s words, “small acts of sabotage” that stretch our definitions of what it means to think and theorize. Death is able to show how the colonial, white, heteronormative family is pulled apart in the three short stories that he reads, and how the stories develop paths to surviving planetary crises and to futures within cyborg, digitized, and utopian families and social structures.

Ahmad Qais Munhazim demonstrates how both strategies – that is, of turning to what lies outside our main objects of study, and of turning entirely to the “margins” where alternative subjectivities and futures are already realities – might not be enough. They argue that Western responses to queer and trans Muslim lives have largely amounted to nothing more than “imperial solidarity,” according to which the struggles of Muslims, and especially trans Muslims, are seen through “the lens of white queer and trans superiority and a Western savior complex.” Through a “de/colonial” approach to ethnography that produces this insight, the scientific voice becomes queer, “transforming the colonial space into a site of research and fieldwork.”

By “research and fieldwork,” what Munhazim means is not too far from what Ellie Gore notices in their study of the queer labor of working-class men in peer education initiatives in Accra, Ghana to support HIV+ men and men who have sex with men. At first glance, Gore’s study – which employs social reproduction theory to make sense of the data gathered from traditional scientific methods without much modification – might seem far removed from Munhazim’s article, and in some ways it is. But what both studies share is a concern for the costs that certain queer lives are made to absorb to do their respective work and how this is naturalized through global political structures (in the case of Gore, the neoliberal global development model; for Munhazim, United States imperialism).

Aine Bennett’s use of a “scavenger methodology” exposes another hidden queer labor, that of science. In her study of the exclusionary identity politics of the “two communities” model in the Northern Ireland conflict, she chooses a scavenger methodology out of recognition of the fatigue of over-researched subjects, and asks us to pause when even research with liberatory goals may result in keeping to the production lines that extract, use up, and impose. She teaches us the value of indirectness in trying to understand how the world works, and this too is part of working in the spaces between “queer” and “science.”

It is useful to read Ausma Bernot and Sara E. Davies’ study of the surveillance of LGBTQ+ communities in China and Charlotte Galpin’s work on white masculinities and Anglo-British exceptionalism together, not as cases of scientific comparison but juxtapositions that help us to understand the operations of states and nations. Bernot and Davies give the Chinese government’s surveillance tactics a name, “social sorting.” This allows the authors to map out how, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital and physical sorting of the population into essentialized gender categories created in effect a reality in which LGBTQ+ people, especially activists and members of advocacy groups, are now living in “a metaphorical fish tank – visible but restrained through a range of social sorting methods.” By contrast, Galpin’s focus is on national discourses rather than the specific instruments of the state; she shows how British national identity is established through an interplay with the feminized European “Other” in the main but also the racialized “Other.” While the article explains Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic through Anglo-British exceptionalism, the temporal parameters of interrogation are more elastic than those of Bernot and Davies’ study, which allows Galpin to set out the compositional ingredients of British white masculinity. From a gender perspective, the two polities’ operations are not dissimilar: the disciplining of the people and their social, political, and cultural imaginations in the service of the nation-state, which is unable to govern and deliver on its promises without requiring, as Munhazim puts it, “freedom and violence as an unending dance.” The British and Chinese cases, as well as the other examples in this issue, are contemporary political realities with significant “hidden-in-plain-sight” connections and intimate and subtle parallel developments for which queer, feminist, de/postcolonial science needs to find appropriate methods, language, and – most importantly – research infrastructure to describe and address. Such methods, language, and infrastructure continue to evade us.

In a way, the findings of Lídia Cabral’s study of agricultural science in Brazil and the experiences of women scientists in its premier state-sponsored research organization, Embrapa, could be applied to studying how queer, feminist, de/postcolonial researchers in critical/social sciences are navigating this thing called “science.” When more socially conscious, participatory methodologies beyond research governed by universalistic technoscientific rationality were encouraged as a matter of policy, the women scientists who were already independently approaching their work in this way, began to flourish; they published more, established collaborations, and were emboldened in their actions. Cabral reports that this period was short lived (from the mid-2000s until 2010), and, with a more conservative president, Jair Bolsonaro, in office, the research environment became even less favorable, and the three women whose life histories Cabral studies withdrew “to the sidelines, a place that they know well from first-hand experience.” While the air might be thicker and the institutional tools sharper in different situations, this story of science is not unfamiliar (see IFJP’s current Conversations section special series, “Restorative and Reparative Conversations”). It is not surprising that many of us find it important to pause regularly and look around to ask: are we OK? Did we breathe today? Did we remember to be free as we did our “science” work?

But the questions do not end there. Especially given the richness and depth of the scholarship in this issue, we have to also ask an important question about representation that Cabral reminds us is part of the science question: where are the academic researchers who are living and working in the various locations in the Global South and the East that are studied in the articles? As Burchiellaro observes in her reflection on positionality, conducting the research and participating in economies of queer tourist consumption requires economic privilege, which therefore predetermines not only who can conduct similar research but also the parameters of this research. Burchiellaro is not alone in recognizing this. In our editorial meetings, we too have been asking ourselves: how many articles are we shepherding through the peer review system from outside the Anglosphere and the Global North? What kinds of editorial decisions have we made that there are so few? Do we need a policy change of the kind that Cabral observed in Embrapa? What form would this take, given that a journal is not a bricks-and-mortar institution with a proper bricks-and-mortar budget? Science is not neutral or cheap to do, and so perhaps we need to take more regular breaks from science and let queer, feminist, and de/postcolonial ideas take over.