Bridgings, Plurilogues, Synergies:Decolonial Queer Feminisms and Materialist Feminisms

This project was born from a desire to rethink gender and sexuality with multiple other relations of power and how they operate in the world, through the contributions of both decolonial feminist and queer theory, and materialist feminist theory, in plurilogue together. Throughout, we have been concerned with what these theories, and their bridgings, polylogues, and synergies, can bring to our analyses of how power materializes in different gendered sites, relations, and localities – from bodies to territories, from the flesh to the soil, from biologies to minerals and land, and from property to labour. And so, materialist feminist theory incites and enables a refined anti-capitalist critique of the socio-economic conditions that structure the exploitation of women and feminized people and the extraction of their labours and bodies. In turn, decolonial perspectives offer us critical insights into the kinds of violence that disparate colonial legacies enact on our contemporary societies. They tell us much about how the imposition of colonial gender and sexuality into colonized space shapes the conditions of life not only for colonialized, racialized gender and sexuality subalterns, but for everyone. They incite us to critically consider what is at stake in ongoing colonially inflected constructions of gender and sexuality, from Palestine to Georgia, from Kashmir to Argentina, from Morocco to the United Kingdom, and what this means for struggles for total liberation for all.