Send message to Author

Paper Short Abstract:

Focusing on material justice and queer activism, my paper proposes a theoretical frame based on an embodied unwriting of the past that can guide ethnographic research in the present. This unwriting with/through the body is rooted in queer and decolonial perceptions of temporality and focuses on how practices of bodily remembering could transform shared histories.

Paper Abstract:

The contribution discusses how an embodied (re-)thinking of queer histories and memorial practices can open up alternative ways of doing ethnographic research. My project focuses on economic justice, investigating how queer movements put into question how we understand labour struggles, and how these demands are linked to struggles for physical integrity and gender self-determination.

Combining frameworks of redistribution activism and politics of safety and care as they pertain to practices of queer activism, my project seeks to build a theoretical-methodological framework that allows for research based on bodily thinking and -remembering. Researching corporeal matter as both meaning making and material reality opens the possibility for an inquiry that is epistemologically and politically engaged. Here, I develop a research framework that puts queer and decolonial temporality into dialogue with feminist new materialism.

How could a practice of opacity (Glissant 1990) based on an embodied remembering that emerges from a queer and decolonial epistemological perspective look like? Trough Freeman's „erotohistoriography“ (2010) as another way to understand time outside a western chronotemporality, I aim to delve into the practice of remembering the past as a political act that is not only invested in the register of trauma and exclusion, but turns toward the pleasure of remembering and desiring (differently) with our bodies.

Bringing new materialism into dialogue with queer temporality means advancing a body-informed ethics of difference to explore possibilities for transformation. This dialogue aims to direct ethnographic research toward expressions of transformative material justice outside a dogmatic and linear perspective.