i.’s Reviews > Queer Lovers and Hateful Others: Regenerating Violent Times and Places > Status Update

"This does not mean that the queer lover is an unambivalent object....An excitedly cuddled object, it is nevertheless regularly mishandled. Its future is uncertain: it may well be discarded depending on its imminent uses....How can we fail to be cuddly for white supremacy?"

"[The queer lover] reassures us that the post-racial community still cares, in spite of growing evidence that poor people and people of colour are abandoned with impunity....At this unstable intersection, the queer lover remains as a symbol of certainty, who reminds 'us' of 'our' benevolence, tolerance and love of diversity, even while the concrete acts of care that would reflect such values are rapidly withdrawn."

"...these acts of commemoration turn fascist violence into a property of racialised bodies: as racist/homophobic hate in the past becomes racialised homophobic hate in the present agents of terror past and present are urgently conflated."

"The politics of commemoration and of hate crime thus share an organisational and political space that is deeply racialised."

"Such trauma narratives reinscribe linear, teleological time in order to establish a clean break with the past. Institutional violence, in particular, must be archaicised and periodised so that 'post-violence reason' can be re-established, ironically by the same institutions that perpetrated the violence in the first place."

"The past is thus a fertile site for queer investment and indeed regeneration..."

"...acts of remembrance do more than merely grieve or work through traumatic pasts....their desire for the past has become a dominant political orientation. I term this orientation queer nostalgia: an active investment in murderous times and places that the nostalgic subject ostensibly seeks to overcome."

"While focusing on the forces that are death-making, we must simultaneously ask what a queer and trans politics would look like that genuinely fosters survival....Such a politics would create spaces where safety is not won by bolstering regimes of exploitation and neglect, and where the violence of the most powerful becomes a bigger scandal than the acts of those subjugated."

"...an abolitionist imagination might also involve attending to the way punitive and pathologising logics undergird informal sites, including those that identify as alternative, radical, or progressive....Hate thus has the same individualising, depoliticising tendencies as neoliberal discourse overall."

"...hate always already emanates from racialised bodies & 'minds' in ways that call for their assimilation and segregation....In taking this further step & interrogating 'hate' alongside 'crime' & 'pathology' as twin pedagogies that educate us about the need for murderous systems of inclusion, we may draw on affect studies as a useful methodology to examine how meaning is ascribed to racialised bodies & populations."