My Current Projects Include:
Territory is Not a Metaphor: Care, Critique, and Letting Go in Decolonial Feminism
Jennifer Nash’s Black Feminism Reimagined (2018) argues for an “ethic of letting go” in Black feminism, a stance she argues might “disrupt the claims of territoriality and defensiveness that…have come to animate black feminist academic practice” (Nash, 2018; 73). In this essay, I read Nash’s “loving critique” of reading practices and genealogies associated with Black feminism – and, in particular, her insistence on de-territorializing the concept of intersectionality – against the burgeoning field of “university studies” which situates the modern university in histories of enslavement and dispossession (e.g. Fuentes and White, 2016; Ahtone and Lee, 2020). The essay asks, most centrally: what does it mean to “de-territorialize” an interpretive practice, like intersectionality, from within settler universities founded in and through dispossession? On what terms might the intellectual practices of care, critique, and letting go developed by Black, feminist, (and) queer scholars like Nash confront the more explicitly decolonial demands of the new university studies?
Teaching like a Dyke: Unresolved Authority in the Queer Theory Classroom
(co-written with Haley Norris)
In “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” (2005), David Eng, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz offer a revitalized, “subjectless” queer theory that is premised on “epistemological humility as [a] form of knowledge production” and which “demands a world in which we must sometimes relinquish not only our epistemological but also our political certitude.” In this essay, we consider what a “subjectless critique” might look like in the context of the classroom.
We do so by interrogating the ways that we – real-life queer academics – live out the commitment to epistemological humility, focusing especially on moments in which normative authority remains unresolved or ambivalently present. What does it mean to take up queerness as a metaphor that represents a divestment from all normative authority, especially when one appears in the classroom as a concrete queer subject located in specific relations of normative power in relation to a university or to one’s students?
We turn to three concrete examples of “unresolved authority” in the classroom: moments when we, as both dykes and teachers, must speak as experts, as arbiters, and as norm-setters. In working through these examples and the contradictory demands they place on us as queer subjects and scholars, we suggest that queer theory’s subjectless critique – and its attendant principles queerness-as-metaphor and epistemological humility – is often at odds with the everyday tasks of pedagogy. Nevertheless, we propose that epistemological humility need not be only a metaphor; instead, we rework Eng et al.’s concept to discuss ways that queer teachers might work through these moments of authority with accountability.
Forthcoming
‘Red Roots’ of Solidarity: Paula Gunn Allen and the Queer Audiences of Intellectual Sovereignty
(Forthcoming in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society)
This article argues for understanding “intellectual sovereignty,” a framework that centers Native contexts as an ethical and political “first frame,” as a mode for understanding - and as an invitation into - the coalitional possibilities for feminist, queer, and Native audiences. I follow queer scholars in arguing that theorizing sexuality’s role in the settler state is an urgent and necessary task, but I also suggest that when queer theorists attempt to engage Native histories through the lens of queer critique, they risk marking queerness as an exemplary critique that transforms Native studies, and not the other way around. In contrast to queer critiques which theorize Native peoples as “structurally queer,” I turn to intellectual sovereignty to argue that the frameworks that we use to theorize coalitional aims of feminist, queer, and Native entanglements matter deeply. I trace the work of Paula Gunn Allen, a Native feminist credited as one of the founders of intellectual sovereignty, to demonstrate that privileging the specificity of Native contexts invites a solidarity grounded in responsibility and repair. Because Allen was active in both the Native and lesbian feminist projects, her many engagements with settler lesbian feminists reveal how intellectual sovereignty both centers Native knowledges and transforms non-Native audiences. Following Allen’s example, I argue that grounding queer/Native studies in intellectual sovereignty shifts the task of settler queers by reversing recognition and transforming the processes of authority and meaning-making. Allen’s exercise of intellectual sovereignty thus performs on an intimate scale the work of solidarity building that is required, still, as a condition of coalitional politics.