a return, and reflexivity
Where do we expect gender and sexuality to shape structures in settler colonial societies? “Everywhere” is the obvious answer: my favorite mug asserts that just when you think you aren’t doing gender, gender is doing you. Gender and sexuality constitute our relationships to place and each other, and so we should expect to see them anywhere we look. At the same time, everywhere is quite a lot, and in the absence of the ability to process everything everywhere all at once, we may find ourselves guided by our preferences and predispositions. For me, when thinking about gender and sexuality, those are oriented strongly away from the family.
I’m thinking about this today because I’m reading Scott Lauria Morgensen’s introduction to a 2012 special issue of Settler Colonial Studies urging the theorization of gender and sexuality specifically regarding settler colonial contexts, instead of colonialism and coloniality more monolithically. I’m reading it because I’m embarking on a new project with two wonderful co-conspirators on the colonial tropes present in contemporary anti-trans rhetoric online in the aftermath of violence. I’m the theory person on this project, and it’s comfortable ground. Still, I’m used to thinking more directly about white supremacy in conjunction with (and as constitutive of) coloniality, so it’s been useful to consider gender more purposefully as a component of that.
In his piece, Morgensen summarizes a series of works in Palestine, Hawaii, and what are now called Australia and the United States about marriage and descent practices used as settler colonial tools of determining belonging/unbelonging, primitive/civilized, and fundamentally of erasing indigenous relations. I am reading them and I find myself surprised, surprisingly, that these are where Morgensen starts in thinking about gender, sexuality, and settler colonialism. This means I need to ask: where would I have started? With queerness, I realize, but specifically queerness outside the family, because this is where I assume it is located. This is where it has been located for me, more out of safety than anything else. My own queer journey has been predicated on keeping my queerness outside of my nuclear family, because what it’s occasionally intruded, the results have been disastrous. I look for queerness and expect to find its oppression in public spaces, in hospitals, in churches, in the streets. And it is there, of course, but I locate it specifically in these places and not others because I expect its full excision from the private sphere, from the household, from the traditional family. I take this as a given, as something that does not have to be actively constructed by the state because families will do it to themselves. This is rooted in experience but is also, crucially, a settler mentality. I do not look to the family because of my own issues, and in doing so I reposition the family as the hetero, cissexual environment Western colonial gender relations want it to be by allowing it to only be that—by letting the Western family structure and all its attendant oppression be all that there is.
There’s more to say about this: my reading group recently read Sophie Lewis’ Abolish the Family, in which she understands the family as the privatization of care. This is not to say that care can’t be private, but Lewis’ argument is that it shouldn’t have to be and that bad things happen when private relations are the only, or the primary, place where we are taught to expect care to manifest. Of course there are shades of gray here, and Lewis’ treatment of alternative families to the Western ideal-type family is thoughtful but ultimately a little unsatisfying to me, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever unpack that fully without confronting my own familial trauma vis-à-vis queerness, because it’s blocking my ability to ponder fully and imagine differently. Le sigh.
Anyway, lots to play with here. I’ve also been thinking a lot about positionality today because I did the final assignment for my PGCHE qualification (Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education, for folks outside the UK), which was a reflective commentary on a research project I conducted on attitudes toward disability and impairment in UK higher ed. The assignment was to reflect on my role as a researcher and my choices in the research design itself, but because I am nothing if not an older version of my insufferable student self, I rejiggered the assignment to allow me to work through some of my negative energy toward UK higher ed and where that energy might be coming from. (I think I would’ve died had I gone to university in the UK, where answering prescribed essay questions is the name of the game. Apologies to every teacher I have ever had.) Put differently, I tried to think about my own ways of knowing disabilities—my own and others’—and it was a helpful exercise for making sense of moments of surprise I experienced in my focus groups and interviews. So I was primed for unpacking surprise whilst doing my reading, I guess. In any event, reflexivity is ever-important and a reminder, to paraphrase Cynthia Dillard, that research is a process of “(re)searching” oneself over and over again. We are in our work, including the earliest stages of it, whether we want to be or not.
Hello! It has been an extremely long time. After an initial first month of sabbatical and some ongoing healing—this feels like the break I never got between defending my dissertation and starting this job—I’ve been flexing my writing muscle again. It feels good. Expect more thoughts in whatever this thing is.
Central to these thoughts is likely to be the unfolding debacle of the American Political Science Association’s 2023 annual meeting, which (to make a very long story short) is being held in contravention of the request of UNITE HERE Local 11, the labor union representing 11,000 hotel workers on strike in Los Angeles for fair wages. The entire mess that APSA leadership created would take me hours to explain, and I might at some point, but the most immediate thing to convey is that you can donate to support graduate students fucked over financially by APSA via the new Graduate Student Support Fund. (You can also support striking workers here.) An enormous kudos to the grad students who got this off the ground, including my very good friends Devon Cantwell-Chavez and Andrew McWard. (If you’re an APSA member or otherwise affiliated with US poli sci, you can also sign this open letter calling on APSA to refund registration fees for those standing with labor and not attending the annual meeting. If the politics of that sentence are making your head spin: yes. Like I said, long story.)
Academics at the University of Melbourne are on strike against levels of casualization that somehow outpace those in the UK. Here is their strike fund.
The University of Chichester has made redundant (i.e., fired) the first Black Briton to be named a professor of history in the UK, and in doing so ended the master’s program he runs on the history of Africa and the African diaspora. I am far from the best person to comment on this, but in a country where only 1% of professors are Black, you can draw your own conclusions about the larger structural patterns this choice reflects and what universities’ supposed commitments to diversity and decolonization actually signify.
A faculty member is dead after a mass shooting at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill yesterday. I am just old enough to have only had a few years of active shooter drills at the end of high school, and the stories of how UNC students navigated the shooting in practiced ways are harrowing. Cue The Onion headline. Deepest sympathies toward this person’s loved ones, colleagues, and students.
Shameless self-promotion corner: since we last spoke, my coauthored passion project on the inherent racism of terrorist designation/proscription has finally been published; my coauthored chapter on the coloniality of the “proxy war” framing in political science research came out; and I wrote a piece on the concept of “mixed, unclear, and unstable ideologies” as white distraction that has gotten more play than either of those other things and raised some predictable ire with the “Prevent is fine actually” crowd. I also spoke about centering trans voices in research on anti-trans violence, wrote a little about the parallel structural issues in US and UK higher ed, and apparently triggered some cishets on the plenary at EWIS in July. All in a day’s work.
Also: I’m still in the place formerly known as Twitter, but I’m also on Bluesky at annameier.bsky.social, if that’s more your vibe. (And the vibes are different! Not always in comfortable ways, but there do seem to be fewer TERFs and Nazis. We take what wins we can get.)
Opportunities
The deadline for travel grants for ISA 2024 is this Friday! The application form takes all of two minutes. You should apply despite ISA program decisions not being officially out yet. (This is progressing steadily behind the scenes, trust me.) Details here.
The deadline for ISA dissertation completion fellowships is also this Friday. If you’re an ISA member and expect 2024–25 to be your final year in grad school, it’s worth your time to apply. Details here.