Politics of Queer Affect: Intentionality, Mediation, Intervention

This project investigates how the legacy of past violence continues to shape individual and social lives, forms of care, and the concept of what it means to be human in the aftermath of violence.

Gendered violence and Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma
Gendered violence and Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma


This project investigates how the legacy of past violence continues to shape individual and social lives, forms of care, and the concept of what it means to be human in the aftermath of violence.

Over the decades gendered violence has affected millions of people across the globe. Today, there is a critical need for greater scholarly and community understanding of both the effects of gendered violence and how to overcome it.

The project analyses the politics of queer affect employed by interracial Indische (Indo-Dutch) women as their investment in reshaping the Indische individual and collective future – a future that celebrates the queer practices and discourses that Indisch families and communities have historically engaged in, but that have been repressed by the normative forces of the colonial and post-colonial racialised regimes of citizenship imposed on interracial subjects.

The project argues that the modes of intentional affective politics created through Indisch women’s interventions are as radical in their critique of the pathologisation of non-conformance to normative understandings of family, society, and biological reproduction and of non-normative female subjectivity, as they are critical of colonialism, racism, and contemporary structural inequalities.

Outcomes

The intended outcome of this study is to provide new data about previously unrecognised facets of violent conflicts, to outline novel ways in which they might be effectively addressed, and to refine our analytical tools for studying them.

Project details

Sponsors

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions
The University of Queensland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
The Australian Academy of the Humanities
The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)
The Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) Leiden
Netherlands and International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden, the Netherlands

Contact

Associate Professor Ana Dragojlovic