Life Haunts Ruin: The Dead Demand that Deathly Ruptures Breed Revolution

This public roundtable will follow a two-day closed workshop at the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, where participants will think through the use of research, study, and knowledge production in a conjuncture marked not only by death and destruction, but also by the intransigence of the powerful in the face of monumental injustice. Building on the workshop, this roundtable will explore what it means to be a scholar of queer and feminist theory amidst the genocide being carried out by Israel in Gaza.

Queer and feminist theory, in their most radical manifestations, have dedicated themselves to the future-impossible – a future where the many so-called deviants of the world who have been made perverse in order to be marked for death could come to own the world. However, in this most deadening and hopeless of conjunctures, it is difficult to invest in let alone imagine alternative futures.

Speakers will explore how we might maintain our commitment to impossible futures as we watch the world burn, and witness its most vulnerable populations killed in real time, their deaths live-streamed on social media, and their murder justified by an imperial world desperate to maintain its grip on what, it is often forgotten, is a global majority.

Please note that space is limited and registered people will be admitted on a first come first serve basis until capacity is reached.

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Speakers:

Ghiwa Sayegh (they/them) is an anarcha-queer writer, independent publisher, and archivist from Beirut. They are the founding editor of Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research. They have an MA in gender studies from Université Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis.

Sherena Razek is a diasporic Palestinian feminist educator, scholar, activist, and labor organizer. Currently, she is a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. Her research focuses on Palestinian visual culture, anti-imperial struggle, and decolonial feminist ecologies. Her dissertation project “Nakba Ecologies: On Elemental Intifada in Colonized Palestine” offers a grounded intervention in the emergent field of elemental media studies, by tethering the classical elements of water, fire, earth and air to their specific valences in Palestinian film, photography, performance, poetics, and counter archives. Her curatorial work has addressed the politics and aesthetics of surveillance, oceanic degradation, and the militarization and materialization of nation-state borders between the Global North and the Global South.

Devon Epiphany Clifton is a black feminist literary theorist and Assistant Professor of African American Literature at UNLV. She previously received her PhD in English from Brown University and her MA from New York University. In addition to African American literature and culture, her work engages psychoanalysis, Caribbean literature, anti-imperial thinking, and queer theory. Her first book project, tentatively titled The Object of Blackness: Passing Sketches, investigates the relationship between blackness as an object of thought and epistemologies of reading. Her scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for The Humanities, the Pembroke Center for Research and Teaching on Women, and the Cogut Institute. Her work appears in the Journal of American Culture.

Layal Ftouni Layal Ftouni is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. As a Dutch Research Council Veni laureate, Layal is working on a book project on the 'reproduction of life', both human and environmental, in conditions of proximity to death and debilitation in the settler colonial context of Palestine. Her publications and areas of research interests are, broadly construed, at the intersection of critical theory, gender studies, Palestine studies, political theory and critiques of the human/ human rights. As well as her educational and research work, Layal is also a founding member of Dutch Scholars for Palestine, a network of educational workers across Dutch Universities committed to the Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination.

Sabiha Allouche is is Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (University of Exeter). When she is not attending to her institutional responsibilities, Sabiha can be found queering stuff or ranting about the state of the world.

Hanna Al Taher is a writer, researcher, and lecturer in Political Theory.