Keywords:
decolonial feminisms, queer diasporic, desire, erotic, non-belongingCopyright (c) 2025 Sara Motta, Suman Lahiry
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Abstract
In this queering decolonial feminist co(w)riting we bring to text a plural voice making of the philosophies and dark wisdoms emergent when queer decolonial feminist diasporic migrant/refugee (non)subjects speak in their/our own terms. We speak from the pluralities of the exteriority of (non)being and t)race of the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Spillers, 1987) as the attempted destruction of the racialized (M)other through blanqueamiento as onto-epistemological project of anti-life in nation-state/governance formation and (re)production. We bring to text the markings of the violating onto-epistemological intimacies of the frontier in the interstices of our everyday subjectification as/to flesh. We thus centre the impossibilities of belonging, homecoming and sanctuary within the logics and (ir)rationalities of the modern/colonial heteropatriarchal capitalist state and its violent (re)production of our dispossession and exile.
Yet we cannot stay in this place for this leaves us bereft reducing us to violation and re-thinigification, spoken as merely this violation. Instead and beyond, we move towards an affirmative presence of exteriority. Here we commit to an epistemological-political praxis in-relation to speak our poetics of that which escapes. We (w)rite as relationality, word and being-knowing as metaphor, myth, onto-epistemological materiality the re-membering of the plurally sided survivance and dark wisdoms (Hill Collins, 1991) of the impurity of our queer racialized and feminised lineages. We poetically travel and dance with our own plural and complex lineages beyond their banishment and negation inherent to many renditions of queer migrations and homecoming and making of homeplace (Wilderson, 2013; Bolaki, 2011; Motta, 2013, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2022c; Lorde, 1982).
We also move in, against and beyond the concept of solidarity (Ponce, 2015; Fellner and Nossem, 2018) as means of embodying relationalities across plurality and difference from exteriority and between those of us inhabiting the borderlands of (non)being as queer racialized and feminised migrants and refugees. We thus articulate a kinship (m)otherwise weaved through and as the erotic in which we poeticise (non)being and the pluralities of home as/and world-making (Gonzalez et al., 2023). We build on the shoulders of queer kin who queer reading and(w)riting through embodied and located modes of producing text in a form that is both a radical relation and radical refusal (Cannon, 2018).
We poetizar la vida through an erotic and dignifying poetics of meaning-making as world-creating, against and beyond the frontiers of reason, right, (political)subjectivity, desire, intimacy and love of (settler)coloniality. Our (w)riting then is a form of queer decolonial feminist resistances and survivance. Our texts are not mere representations but enfleshed cosmopolitics of subjects-in-relation who disrupt and burlarse of the codifications and containments of the frontier and its thingi-fication as it attempts to assimilate and annihilate our poli and trans being-knowing in and as the world. We do this for us, and our struggles and yearnings for plural in relation homeplace and sanctuary.
In our case, that is Suman and I, queer poetry is our shared tongue of the poetics of this, our, erotic medicine-making methodology. This allows us to touch our tears and prepares us to fight against the onto-epistemological war declared against us again and again, day after day. Our queer diasporic feminist decolonising art sharpens our weapons of self-care and sovereignties (m)otherwise. Queer poetry and poetics implores us to take the time to listen to each other and to together decipher the indecipherable. This assists in collective pluridiverse self/other healing and/as homecoming. For us, poetry is a poetics that has the potential to bring into being both a speaking truth to power, in joyful defiance, and a form of poetizando la vida so that we might birth into be-ing becoming multiple world-making futurities.
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