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Nikita Dhawan et al. 15 is Professor of Political Science at the Leopold-Franzen University Innsbruck and Director of the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies, Cluster of Excellence ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’, Goethe University Frankfurt. She has held visiting fellowships at Universidad de Costa Rica (2013); Institute for International Law and the Humanities, University of Melbourne, Australia (2013); Program of Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley, USA (2012); University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain (2011); Pusan National University, South Korea (2011); Columbia University, New York, USA (2008). Her publications include Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007), Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (editor, 2014); Postkoloniale Theorie: Eine kritische Einführung (with Maria do Mar Castro Varela, 2014). Antke Engel is Director of the Institute for Queer Theory in Berlin, a site where academic debate meets up with political activism and artistic/cultural practices (www.queer-institut.de). She received her PhD in Philosophy at Potsdam University and works as independent scholar in the fields of queer, feminist and poststructuralist theory, political philosophy and visual cultural studies. She held visiting professorships at Hamburg University (2003–2005) and at Vienna University (2011), and a research fellowship at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2007–2009). She has published numerous essays and the two monographs Wider die Eindeutigkeit (2002) and Bilder von Sexualität und Ökonomie (2009). Jule Jacob Gorvin is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and a research assistant at the Institute for Queer Theory, Berlin. After studying philosophy and comparative literature at Freie Universität and the University of Paris VIII, she published several articles, including Widerspenstige Körper: Ein Vergleich körperkonzeptueller Widerstandsstrategien bei Judith Butler und Pierre Bourdieu (2012). In her PhD project Aufbegehren und Begierden: Zum Verhältnis von Begehren und Ökonomie, she is focusing on the epistemological and socio-political entanglements of desire and economy in the light of neoliberalism. Her research interests include political and social philosophy, theories of desire, sexuality studies, body politics, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and philosophy of economy. Christoph F. E. Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. He received a PhD in theoretical physics (1993) and another in German literature with a dissertation on the critical potential of paradoxical pleasures (2001). His edited volumes include Tension/Spannung (2011), The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini’s Multistable Subjectivities, Traditions, Geographies (with L. Di Blasi and M. Gragnolati, 2012), Situiertes Wissen und regionale Epistemologie: Zur Aktualität Georges Canguilhems und Donna J. Haraways (with A. Deuber-Mankowsky, 2013), Multistable Figures: On the Critical Potentials of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing (2014) and Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, The Power of Tolerance: A Debate (editor, with L. Di Blasi, 2014). Volker Woltersdorff (aka Lore Logorrhöe) is an independent scholar and affiliated fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. He received a PhD in Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on gay coming-out narrative and practice. From 1999 to 2010 he was research assistant at the Institute of Comparative Literature of Freie Universität Berlin and Member of the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Kulturen des Performativen’. His main research interests lie in queer and feminist theories, studies in sadomasochism, subcultural aesthetics and the intersection of heteronormativity and capitalism. He has published numerous essays and the monograph Coming out: Die Inszenierung schwuler Identitäten zwischen Auflehnung und Anpassung (2005). (Global Justice and Desire | “Introduction” | DOA: 4/19/2023 | SAoki)

In this vein, Rosemary Hennessy (2000) pinpoints the co-optation of lesbian and gay communities and argues that capitalism does not need heteronormativity to function. Rather, she affirms, neoliberal capitalism mobilizes desire in order to obtain compliance from individuals. At the same time, the neoliberal precarization of workforce undermines traditional gender identities (Völker 2011) as much as precarization builds upon the feminization of labour and the continuity of coloniality, for example in domestic care work (cf. Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2011). Acknowledging the danger of co-optation, yet turning it into a case for an anti-capitalist queer politics, Lisa Duggan (2003) demands that a queer politics of rights and cultural representations be thoroughly intertwined with a politics of economic justice, in order to halt the politics of upward redistribution enforced by neoliberal politicians. Thus, the increasing socio-cultural integration of diversified genders and sexualities cannot simply be celebrated, but has to be analysed in its double-edged role (Engel 2013). Nonetheless, neoliberal policies can equally rely on the neo-traditionalization of heteronormative and patriarchal family structures, on nationalist and racist identity constructions, and on an intensification of the exploitative global division of labour. Accordingly, other authors address the contradictory effects of capitalism as simultaneously liberatory and exploitative of precarious bodies and subjects, arguing that resistance and anti-capitalist politics have to be developed from within neoliberal subjectivation (Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan 2002; Pühl 2003; Engel 2009; Kolářová 2011; Woltersdorff 2011).

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