The chapter explores middling as an embodied, situated methodology for analysing friction in intersectional, trans, anti-racist, feminist politics and activism. It asks if middling together with intersectional, affect-theoretical and new materialist perspectives, and grounding in an ethics of unease, can foster alternative understandings of stalemated conflicts in social and environmental justice movements. Working from a linguistic definition of middle voice as a verbform which articulates reciprocicality (negative or positive), and resonates with a Spinozist affect-theoretical understanding of bodies affecting and being affected by each other, the chapter focuses on two frictional issues: transgender and race. Two cases are scrutinized. One addresses the upsurge of hostility between some radical feminist groups and parts of the trans movement; the other centres on a US media debate on the question whether or not the concepts, transgender and transracial, can be legitimately analogized. The cases are analysed from three perspectives: how mutually exclusive corpo-affectively invested onto-epistemologies produce friction; how an ethics of unease can perhaps lead to more in-depth, but still corpo-affectively situated, understandings of friction; and how a postconstructionist approach, which carefully addresses the intra-action of discourse and matter, can contribute to a rethinking of friction in combined intersectional and new materialist perspectives.

The chapter accounts for the book’s theoretical and methodological framework, and main ambitions. Its foundation in pluriversal conversations on transnational, intersectional and decolonial feminisms is foregrounded, and related to the overall aim: to reflect upon and analytically practice transgressions of the methodological nationalist approaches that are ingrained in much contemporary humanities and social science research. The concept of pluriversality is presented as an alternative to the universalisms of Western modernity, and transnational, intersectional and decolonial feminisms are introduced as frameworks which can help critical scholars to push their research beyond conventional disciplinary reliance on methodologically nationalist traditions. The volume’s commitment to postdisciplinarity and emergent, explorative methodologies, including experiments with a blurring of boundaries between academic and creative writing genres, is emphasized. It is argued that such approaches are needed to transgress the limitations of methodologically nationalist outlooks. The chapter’s reflections on transgressive methodological frameworks is presented as a pluriversal conversation between members of the editorial team. Finally, the chapter tells the  story of the volume’s coming into being through encounters between scholars of different academic ages, affiliated with universities located along Global South/North/East/West axes, who met to establish multiply situated reflections on border transgressing research methodologies.   

Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters reclaims the notion of alien encounters together with strange, but queerly loved companions, Vulgar slugs, diatoms (micro-algae), and familiars (spiritguides of witches), the book’s three human co-authors ask: what would it take to establish more-than-human, bio- and geo-egalitarian co-existence on a planet in trouble?  

This playfully crafted mixed-genre book is informed by feminist posthumanisms, and co-created with a spectral community of more-than-humans, who are respectfully summoned to contribute with their perspectives. In focus of the entangled artistic-philosophical-poetic investigations are questions of ethics, aesthetics and methodologies to co-exist response-ably rather than based on modern human beliefs in exceptionalism, and entitlement to sovereignty, control and conquest of more-than-human worlds. 

Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters is intended for broad global audiences of researchers, teachers, professionals, NGOs, politicians, students from undergraduate to postgraduate levels, artists, writers, activists and artivists, who are interested in entangled artistic-poetic-philosophical modes of understanding the world as well as in ecology, new feminist materialism, critical posthumanism, and questions about radically rethinking and reimagining human/more-than-human relations on Earth.

The chapter uses a poetic, autophemenographic text, contemplating the cliffs, built by fossilized micro-algae, species diatoms, as an entrancepoint to a reflection on a planetary ethics of companionship. Rather than approaching the 55 mio year old diatomite cliffs as material from which to extract value, it is suggested that they should be seen as wise ancestors, who can teach us lessons about life, death and time. To frame the discussion, the chapter, firstly, gives a brief introduction to diatom biology and the geohistory of diatomite (sediments of fossilized diatoms), to the author’s intimate feelings of companionship with alive and fossilized diatoms, and to the posthuman autophenomenographic methodology which guides her contemplations of the diatoms. Secondly, the  author discusses the revised understandings of life, death, and time which her efforts to corpo-affectively empathize (symphysize) with alive and dead diatoms helped her to establish. She also accounts for the ways in which these revisions are sustained by a vitalist materialist and immanence philosophical approach. In an open-ended conclusion, she suggests an ethics of planetary companionship, based on the contemplations of the corpo-affective bonds, she has established  with the diatoms. 

This chapter is an interview conversation with feminist performance studies scholar Swati Arora who shares her thoughts on transnational and decolonial feminisms and epistemes. The conversation draws on Swati’s research on performance cultures, her activist engagements with ”Decolonize the University” movement, and her experiences from her intertwined academic and political trajectory, informed by embodied experiences of inhabiting a multiplicity of different geopolitical locations in the Global South (Delhi and Cape Town) and the Global North (Amsterdam and London). Interweaving Swati’s highly charged descriptions of activist practices and performances with her in-depth theoretical reflections, the interview digs into the ways in which her transnational trajectory and overlapping situatednesses have made her very aware of epistemic differences, erasures, and the urgent need for deploying the tricksterous feminist practice of translations as a point of departure for pluriversal dialogues, and a conscious move away from monologic universality. In the interview, Swati shares insights from her forthcoming book on performance cultures in Delhi, a manifesto she wrote to decentre Theatre and Performance Studies, and her research on a feminist performance Walk by the Indian performer and playwright Maya Rao, which engaged with translation as an act of transnational solidarity in highly complex ways.  

The interview conversation focuses on Victoria Kawesa’s take on African and decolonial feminism, discussed against the backdrop of her life story as an anti-racist, feminist activist, writer and scholar. Victoria has been based in Sweden since she arrived there as nine-year-old in 1984 together with her mother and siblings, coming as political refugees from Uganda, a country steeped in civil war at the time. As a practising Catholic, Victoria’s father had been brutally murdered by the secret police of the then Ugandan leader, Idi Amin. The interview aligns itself with the personal-political-theoretical startingpoints of Victoria’s research, working its way from her childhood in black-normative Uganda to her experiences of racism in white-normative Sweden. It links glimpses of her life history narrative, as told in her forthcoming dissertation, Black Masks/White Sins: Becoming a Black Obuntu Feminist, with the theoretical and political perspectives she also develops there. The conversation focuses on corpo- and geopolitical situatedness, and how it matters for transnational feminist cartographies, onto-epistemologies, and possibilities for alliance building. From her situated perspective, Victoria emphasizes the need for differentiation within Black Feminism to make space for African and decolonial feminisms, based on other genealogies than the middle-passage epistemologies that dominate US contexts.  

The chapter aims to contribute to a rethinking of queer kinship on new-materialist grounds, while critically-affirmatively transgressing the discourse-theoretical and voluntaristic concept, families of choice. Drawing on the author’s poetic-philosophic research on death, dying, mourning and afterlife in queerfeminist and new-materialist perspectives, the chapter discusses the agency of corpoaffective bonds in the context of rainbow kinship relations. In accordance with the method of autophenomenography and the author’s further development of it within the framework of a posthuman phenomenology of mourning, and her use of poetic writing as a method of inquiry, the analytical material is autobiographical, poetic texts. The texts explore intense corpoaffective moments, related to the author’s lesbian life partner’s cancerdeath. Based on an immanence philosophical analysis of death as becoming-imperceptible, the author suggests that her partner’s death made her and her rainbow kin co-experience an affective void, to which they responded through collectively shared mourning practices. It is discussed how the collective mourning for the author meant that her relations to her rainbow kin intensified, calling forward a corpoaffective move from her earlier identification as lesbian co-mother to a desire to subjectively fill the void mother space. Furthermore, the chapter puts focus on the agency of temporalities in the formation of intergenerational rainbow kinship.

This edited volume brings transnational feminisms in conversation with intersectional and decolonial approaches. The conversation is pluriversal; it voices and reflects upon a plurality of geo- and corpopolitical as well as epistemic locations in specific Global South/East/North/West contexts. The aim is to explore analytical modes that encourage transgressing methodological nationalisms which sustain unequal global power relations, and which are still ingrained in the disciplinary perspectives that define much social science and humanities research.

A main focus of the volume is methodological. It asks how an engagement with transnational, intersectional and decolonial feminisms can stimulate border-crossings. Boundaries in academic knowledge-building, shaped by the limitations imposed by methodological nationalisms, are challenged in the book. The same applies to boundaries of conventional – disembodied and ethically un-affected – academic writing modes. The transgressive methodological aims are also pursued through mixing genres and shifting boundaries between academic and creative writing.  

Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms is intended for broad global audiences of researchers, teachers, professionals, students (from undergraduate to postgraduate levels), activists and NGOs, interested in questions about decoloniality, intersectionality, and transnational feminisms, as well as in methodologies for boundary transgressing knowledge-building.

The chapter suggests a genealogical approach to feminist debates on intersecting enactments of power and resistance. A starting point is the ongoing “intersectionality wars”, which, particularly in a US context, have been framed among others as critiques of European feminism claimed to “whiten” and neoliberalise intersectionality through monocategorical (liberal) understandings of oppression and power, and through defensive positionings which bring in class, when confronted with critiques for lack of attention to race. Instead of staying within the stalemates of these debates, a genealogical approach is offered that looks into the archives of socialist feminisms, post- and decolonial feminisms, queer feminisms and posthuman feminisms, and their putting gender/class, gender/race, gender/sexuality and gendered human/non-human relationships, respectively, as key to analyses of intra-acting power dynamics and resistances. Following a Foucauldian conceptualisation of genealogy, historical links between different critical feminist theorisings of multiple oppressions, based on gender, race, class, sexuality and human/non-human relations, should be investigated retrospectively rather than traced along linear chronologies. Against this background, the chapter aims at suggesting ways of rethinking current struggles over intersectionality in terms of exploring how to reconfigure them through genealogical groundings, which not only investigates intersecting identities in a grid-like fashion, but asks about their intertwined genealogies in entangled systems of power: capitalism, post/colonialism, heteronormativity, Western modernity, and the Anthropocene, i.e., power systems which the mentioned archives have critically pinpointed as the ones to be resisted and changed. The methodology of genealogical grounding is explored with inspiration from feminist research, which cross-cuts borders between archives.

The essay contemplates retirement as a portal of possibilities which may open time for diving into both haunting and joyful questions that the being tied-up with admin-work formerly has prevented the pursuit of. Questions which the retired academic could engage in are piled up, eg. the haunting ones concerning classic Humanities’ celebration of Universal (White) Man and human exceptionalism. Questions about portals leading from the haunted space of the Humanities to an elsehwhere, and what to take with us through these portals, are also interpellated. Critique and aesthetics are discussed as maybe worthwhile to carry to the other side.