Seminar: Queer Quantum: When Communities Police Themselves

Seminar Topic: Queer Quantum: When Communities Police Themselves

Speaker: Dr And Pasley (they/them), University of Auckland

Date: Monday, April 22nd 2024

Location: PC-01.9.10 (Conf 1), Western Sydney University, Parramatta City campus (Zoom option available and zoom details will be sent before the seminar).

Time: 1:30-3:00pm

Bio: Dr And Pasley’s research involves co-designing trans-led sexuality education with trans secondary students in Aotearoa New Zealand. Their doctoral research explored trans secondary students’ educational worlds, which they are currently turning into a book. They are also co-editing a book on “Gender Un/Bound” with Professors Susanne Gannon and Jayne Osgood.

About the Seminar: This presentation is based on a forthcoming article that examines the way in which queer normativities produce hegemony within queer (incl. trans) communities, ironically undoing the purpose of queer dis/identification (Love, 2014). These dynamics are traced back to the coloniality of gender (Lugones, 2007), which form the basis of the binary gender/sex/sexuality paradigms that queerness is designed to resist, then explores how reterritorialization strategies have tended to foster homo- (Duggan, 2002) and transnormativities (Vipond, 2015). This dynamic is also perpetuated by the epistemologies of (postHegelian) recognition that underpin engagements with queer performativity (Stark, 2014; cf. Butler, 1990). Like colonial notions of blood quantum, designed to undermine those who are disqualified by colonialities of power (Quijano, 2000; Jackson, 2020), the concept of a queer quantum emerges, whereby ‘belonging’ is rendered conditional on adequate queer performativity. Those who cannot or refuse to abide by queer normativities become subject to the lateral violence of reterritorialization. Rather than try to reterritorialize queer norms (again), this work employs agential realism (Barad, 2007) to diffract Māori responses to blood quantum with queer notions of chosen family (Weston, 1997) and crip ancestorship (Milbern, 2019) to disrupt the deployment of queer quanta.