SPlease join us (online) for this Gender/Sexuality/Culture Interdisciplinary Research Seminar, hosted by the Gender Studies programme at the University of Melbourne.

Decolonial Queer Worldmaking

Date: Wednesday 18th September 2024, 3PM AEST Melbourne time (7AM CEST Paris time)

Location: On Zoom

Given the overpopulated discourse in academia on decolonisation and other cognate terminology, this talk will endeavour to define decolonial queerness(-es) as a form of worldmaking in conjunction with what has been referred to as the ‘decolonial turn’. Through what I term as the act of ‘writing over’, informed by the cultural co-constitution that the global North and South produce, a strategy can potentially become visible in various inter-disciplines, especially in terms of how queer and trans worldmaking is at the forefront of what Walter Mignolo has called ‘decolonial aesthesis’. As such, this talk attends explicitly to defining and articulating the connections that ensue from two socially relevant theories, ie, decolonial and queer theoirsation, that overlap and converge towards notions of transformative politics and justice. In addition, eschewing a separate-sphere approach to the two fields of knowledge making, it gestures towards linking decoloniality to queerness in an attempt to “de-link” from disciplinary rigidity and argues for a common connective thread. My argument in this talk seeks to enact a decolonial critique of transnational queerness by bringing into conversation topics and research areas related to genders and sexualities and racialization politics. The questions that impel this current research include: What is coloniality of sexuality and how does it operate? Which critiques can be mobilised in opposition? How do racialised categories collide with queer narratives to sediment already existing hierarchies of humanity? What can decolonial queerness, not singular but pluralised, offer in this scenario. Providing readings of specific examples, I deploy a double-pronged approach implicating sexualities, genders, and race in theorisation of decoloniality constitutes a necessary generative paradigm that allows for exercising vigilance apropos of un-/intentional erasures produced in decolonial knowledge and worldmaking.

Sandeep Bakshi researches on transnational queer and decolonial enunciation of knowledges. He received his PhD from the School of English, University of Leicester, UK, and is currently employed as an Associate Professor of Decolonial, Postcolonial and Queer Studies at University Paris Cité. He coordinates two research seminars, “Peripheral Knowledges” and “Empires, Souths, Sexualities,” and leads the Pôle Société Civile of the Cité du Genre Institute, Université Paris Cité. Co-editor of Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (Oxford: Counterpress, 2016), ‘Decolonial Trajectories’, special issue of Interventions (2020), and Qu’est-ce que l’Intersectionnalité? Dominations plurielles : sexe, classe et race (2021), he has published on queer and race problematics in postcolonial literatures and cultures. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Decolonizing Sexualities Network

This event is online-only, hosted on Zoom. Video conferencing links will be distributed to registered attendees on the day of the event.

The Gender Studies programme at the University of Melbourne is committed to providing a welcoming, inclusive, diverse and rigorous scholarly environment for all of our students and staff. Our work critically and ethically addresses contemporary formations of gender, feminism, transgender studies, and sexuality studies. We strive to ensure that the pedagogic and scholarly spaces in which we engage – from the subjects we teach in our undergraduate Major, to our research, and to this seminar series – are pro-actively affirming and inclusive of the diversity in our academic community.