https://doi.org/10.51897/interalia/YBGF1042
Queer Indiscipline, Decolonial Revolt. The Production of Undisciplined Knowledges in the Neoliberal Age
Tyna Fritschy
Abstract
As an intervention into a domesticated academic knowledge production and an increasingly normative queer theorizing, Queer Indiscipline, Decolonial Revolt asks for the proliferation of other modalities of thinking and writing. The context of such interrogation is the neoliberal restructuring of the university which comfortably accommodates criticality. Where criticality has lost its sting, this paper calls for a daring indiscipline opposing political, public, and scientific disciplining. This brings practices of doing knowledge and not the knowledges as such into attention. An intimacy between the queer and the undisciplined is established by referencing the resistance to assimilationist politics and practices as queer theory’s principal asset. Yet, undisciplined knowledges are not only geared towards challenging the bounds of the discipline(s), but also, and more broadly, towards decolonial futures. “Queer Indiscipline, Decolonial Revolt” explores various moments of concomitant unlearning and improvisation on and beyond the academic stage. The piece conducts three non-linear explorations. The first part analyzes the making of a hierarchical knowledge machine as part of capitalist modernity and revisits moments of queer and black queer theorizing that challenge the dividing lines between high/low, sensible/nonsensical, intellectual/corporeal, theory/practice, speech/chatter, etc. The second part discusses the masterful subject as the agent of knowledge. While the persistence and the pervasiveness of such master fantasy gets acknowledged, the verve of this paper is oriented towards the modality of queer dispossession. The final section gives way to the sabotage inherent in the unruly rhythm of life. Such sabotage is tested to counteract the frameworks, formats and concepts which articulate intellectuality on a more fundamental level. This advances the deconstruction of intellectuality to the terrifying and beautiful point where intellectuality is co-extensive with the social.
Keywords: knowledge production, intellectuality, decoloniality, indiscipline, dispossession
