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Postracial Europe? Minority Activism and the Queering of Ethnicity

This talk draws from Professor El-Tayeb’s recent book, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Duke University Press, 2011).

Date: February 27, 2012
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: Room 108, North House, Munk School of Global Affairs

The translocal strategies of resistance to the Europe-wide forms of racialization originate in a queer of color identity and activism shaped by transnational movements — central among them U.S. Women of Color Feminism and Hip Hop –while being rooted in particular geo-historical configurations of race, religion, colonialism, sexuality, nation and “Europeanness.”  Professor El-Tayeb will present the book’s larger framework, then explore the spatiotemporal queering of communities of color through a neoliberal restructuring of the city, in which the symbolic inclusion of the white LGBT community is dependent on the exclusion of people of color and on the erasure of queer of color positionality.

Judith Halberstam described European Others as “a ground-breaking study, a theoretical adventure, and a major contribution to the literature on European racisms, queer diaspora, immigration, queer subcultures, and queer of color critique. No other scholar… has been able to weave together the strands of sexuality, gender, race, and resistance in such a daring and compelling way.”

This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States, Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, Department of History, Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, and the Women and Gender Studies Institute.