Location: MIT

Tuesdays 6:30 - 8:30 PM

March 19 - April 16, 2019

How does moralism operate at the very heart of US imperialism and settler colonialism? How does this moralism seep into and absorb the categories of life and death itself, constituting a distinct form of biopolitics? How does the seemingly rational and commonsense sanctity surrounding the “value of life” in US “terrorism” discourse reflect our nation-state’s commitment to erasing indigenous people(s) and anti-colonial resistance? And how and why does queer theory aid in the project of detecting and overcoming all of these hierarchical moralisms? In this microseminar, we will engage the recent book Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony (Columbia UP: 2018) and the primary texts that sustain its inquiry in order to address some of these questions.

Faculty

C. Heike Schotten is Associate Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests lie at the various intersections of queer theory, Nietzsche studies, biopolitics, the War on Terror, and liberatory critical theory. Drawing on each of these areas, her research theorizes the various meaning of and possibilities for liberation within the specific contexts of U.S. imperialism, U.S. settler colonialism, and historically still-hegemonic Euro-American constructs of knowledge and knowing.