Scott Lauria Morgensen

The biopolitics of settler colonialism: right here, right now

Settler colonialism is exemplary of the processes of biopower theorised by Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. However, settler colonialism remains naturalised within theories of biopower and theories of its relation to coloniality. White supremacist settler colonisation produces specific modes of biopolitics that sustain not only in settler states but also in regimes of global governance that inherit, extend, and naturalise their power. I extend Patrick Wolfe’s theory that a ‘logic of elimination’ constitutes settler colonialism in the genocide and amalgamation of Indigenous peoples, by indicating that this also indigenises and naturalises white settler nations as projections of the West. Agamben’s work illuminates how Indigenous peoples are eliminated in a state of exception to Western law, which by functioning to erase consanguinity – as the patriarch in Roman law eliminates the defiant son - explains Indigenous peoples’ seemingly contradictory incorporation within and excision from the body of white settler nations. This biopolitical process specific to settler colonialism also structures the manner in which white settler societies demonstrably universalize Western law, both within their bounds and in global arenas. My call to denaturalise settler colonialism in social theory is but a first step towards broader study of how the biopolitics of settler colonialism structure current modes of biopower and require concerted critique at the intersections of Indigenous and settler colonial studies.

Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities

Settlement conditions the formation of modern queer subjects and politics in the United States. This essay newly interprets the settler formation of U.S. queer modernities by inspiration of Jasbir Puars critique of homonationalism. Puar argues that homonationalism produces U.S. queers as regulatory over the racialized and sexualized populations targeted within the imperial biopolitics of the war on terror. I explain homonationalism as a quality of U.S. queer modernities having formed within a colonial biopolitics, in which the terrorizing sexual colonization of Native peoples produces modern sexuality as a function of settlement. This essay reinterprets historical accounts at the intersections of queer, Native, and colonial studies to show how a colonial biopolitics of modern sexuality relationally produces Native and settler sexual subjects. Modern queer projects enact this biopolitics when their normatively non-Native and settler form distances Native people from sexual modernity, even as they seek modern sexual freedoms in the settler state. Homonationalism arises here, as one effect of settlements naturalization and defense in U.S. queer modernities, and as one means by which the continued colonization of Native peoples and land shapes the imperial projections of the United States and its subjects. Settler homonationalism may be destabilized by marking and challenging its historical formation and holding queer projects accountable to Native struggles for decolonization.

Theorising gender, sexuality and settler colonialism: an introduction

‘Hoke-tee’, the cover image offered to this issue by Taskigi/Diné artist Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, presents a protean site for considering how our contributors advance theories of settler colonialism. Taken from the series Portraits of Amnesia, ‘Hoke-tee’ portrays juxtapositions that interrupt any narrative of the moon as terra nullius. Whose human existence becomes legible once the moon appears as a site traversed by humans: in body, but also in memory, or in history? We know his – a white heteropatriarchal national manhood achieved here by having mined rare earths, fabricated massive technologies, and invested in capital’s projection to send him and his white brethren to this place. But what crosses the frame, unnoticed by a gaze he directs always forward, and elsewhere: a child, whose dress may be elevating, whose chair may be transporting a historical awareness and multi-generational presence long-defiant of his Manifest Destiny?

Queer settler colonialism in Canada and Israel: articulating Two-Spirit and Palestinian queer critiques

This essay plies potential connections among Two-Spirit and Palestinian queer critiques to advance a comparative analysis of queer settler colonialism in Canada and Israel. Abroad literature in indigenous studies and at its intersections with queer studies now centres the intellectual and political interventions of Indigenous LGBTQ/Two-Spirit people in North America. In turn, after years of organising among Palestinian LGBTQ people in Palestine, Israel, and the diaspora, a broad array of queer critiques of gender and sexuality in Israel/Palestine recently has appeared in social movements and scholarship. This essay compares Two-Spirit and Palestinian queer critiques so as to newly examine the sexualisation of settler colonialism in Canada and Israel. The essay cites an extensive literature on queer settler colonialism in the Americas, and its comparability with queer Palestinian critiques, to illuminate the specificity of queer settler colonialism in Israel. An extended analysis of Eytan Fox’s 2006 film The Bubble assists in diagnosing the complicities and investments in settler colonialism that characterise contemporary Israeli LGBTQ politics. The essay concludes by demonstrating how such comparisons deepen knowledge of the relational formation of settler colonialisms, and of their inherently gendered and sexualised formation.

Arrival at Home: Radical Faerie Configurations of Sexuality and Place

Radical faerie culture produces modern sexual minorities by mediating their racial and national relationship to histories of colonization. Radical faeries arose in the US by forming itinerant rural gatherings--and, over time, landed rural sanctuaries to host them--where they sought to liberate an authentic gay subjectivity grounded in indigenous cultural roots. I examine the formation of rural sanctuaries and gatherings as sources for gay liberation by investigating how they are structured as spaces of homecoming. Radical faeries who travel to gatherings and sanctuaries arrive at home--despite neither originating nor remaining at these sites--when they find in rural spaces and in tales of indigeneity a self-acceptance and shared nature that grants new belonging to settled land. I narrate key moments when practices of rural mobility and emplacement call gay men home to authentic subjectivity and radical community, by means of loving communion, multigenerational rural ties, indigenous spirituality, and a newly indigenized relationship to settled land. My argument arises from reflexive ethnographic interpretation of the quotidian practices of gatherings and sanctuaries. My ethnographic attention marks the integrity of radical faerie culture as a creative mediation of the racial, national, and colonial conditions of sexuality. My analysis calls queer studies to attend more deeply to the intersectionality and coloniality of sexual minority formations in settler societies, and to let ethnographic interpretation mark both how normative power relations condition sexualities and how sexual subjects creatively engage them.

The Representability and Responsibility of Cisgender Queer Men in Women's Studies

How can cisgender queer men come to be represented within women’s studies in terms of our commitments to feminism? What prevents cisgender queer men from being known—by ourselves, or by others—as committed agents of feminist social change?1 I consider these questions by reflecting on fifteen years of work as a cisgender queer man in women’s studies, from graduate study through successive tenure-track appointments in departments historically-identified with the field. While working as a student, scholar, teacher, curriculum designer, administrator, and community liaison, I learned that my status and that of other cisgender queer men in women’s studies often remains anomalous. Cisgender queer men regularly fail to be representable as part of the “feminism” normatively associated with women in women’s studies. Yet they also remain elided by representations of the “men” whom the field holds accountable to feminism. My essay plies the tension in this simultaneous presence and erasure of cisgender queer men as key to our longstanding participation in women’s studies. Given that learning and working in women’s studies can redefine our lives around a primary commitment to feminism, I wish to trouble the anomalous status that we recurrently receive. Rather than suggesting that this anomaly can be remedied by some form of inclusion, I mark it as a sustained contradiction in women’s studies requiring critique. For many years, Western and White settler feminist thought has been