Discussant: Hashem Abushama, DPhil Candidate, School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford

This talk will examine racialised, sexualised and gendered configurations of settler-colonial domination to ground decolonial queering aesthesis that the case of Palestinian artistic productions enable. The talk is divided into two parts; the first part identifies the functionality of Pinkwashing as a settler sensual regime, focusing on theorising the relation between sex (sex/gender systems) and sense (sensory structures including emotive and affective dimensions of politics) that implicates Zionist structure of native elimination. It draws on Israel’s (inter)national promotion of its pluralistic (gendered and sexed) self, to show how the sovereign parameters of a settler-colonial consensus mediate the sensorial and liberatory affects of global queerness. The second part unpacks the value of queering aesthesis, focusing on examples from Palestinian queer artistic productions in order to chart the significance of queer productions in relation to the politics of refusal that the queer indigenes enable. In doing so, the analysis takes Palestine as a site for expanding the political and theoretical significance of decolonial geographies, tracing the generative spatial and epistemic value that emerges from across settler colonial, decoloniality, native feminist and queer studies.

sneha.krishnan@ouce.ox.ac.uk or Dr. Amber Murrey amber.murrey-ndewa@ouce.ox.ac.uk.