Article

Dialogues in Human Geography

2020, Vol. 10(1) 9–18
An other geography ª The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/2043820619890433
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Natalie Oswin
University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada

Abstract
The marginalization, sidelining, erasure and dismissal of ‘othered’ people and epistemologies persist within
the discipline of geography today. In the present article, I discuss this fact as a source of harm for many
individuals, a result of centuries of white supremacist heteropatriarchal grounding and a failure of the
collective critical geographical imagination. A new turn is underway, however, one that turns away from the
mainstream of the discipline and toward each ‘other’. Solidarities across modes of difference are building in
scholarship that inhabits an epistemological elsewhere, and these can and must be harnessed in this time of
serious threats to academic freedom and social justice.

Keywords
difference, epistemic violence, geographic thought, politics of knowledge production, resistance

The voice I raise is at once Indigenous and scholar,
though it feels impossible to be heard as both at the
same time.
– Sarah Hunt (2014)
Whiteness creates geographies of power that inhibits
people of color from moving freely within the
discipline.
– Shangrila Joshi et al. (2015)
While the structural position of the first-year PhD
student . . . is itself conducive to imposter syndrome,
my gender and skin color began to feel like additional
obstacles rather than resources.
– Camilla Hawthorne (from Hawthorne and Meché, 2016)
I am tired of translating the insights of queer theory for
a broader critical [geography] audience. I am tired of
having to make a case for sexuality’s rightful place on
critical [geographical] theory’s map.
– Natalie Oswin (2018)
I became a geographer because I needed spatial anal-
ysis to understand human relationships to place. I must
insist that I am a geographer because I have been told
by colleagues that I will never be a geographer. Is the
insistence on hiring ‘real’ geographers a disciplinary
gatekeeping, or a racial gatekeeping?
– Megan Ybarra (2019)
I could keep going and fill this entire article with
quotations from geographers expressing their

Do we really need to remind our colleagues all over

Corresponding author:
again of arguments that have been made so well and so Natalie Oswin, Department of Human Geography, University of
often before by feminist theorists . . . Gender mat- Toronto Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, ON M1C
ters . . . Why are we still talking to ourselves, I wonder? 1A4, Canada.
– Linda McDowell (2016) Email: natalie.oswin@gmail.com
10
disappointment and frustration at the marginaliza-
tion, dismissal and erasure of themselves and/or
their alternate epistemologies within the discipline.1
For evidence of the substance of these claims, pick
up any sampling of disciplinary or sub-disciplinary
research companions, handbooks or textbooks.
There you will generally find content by scholars
writing from a limited range of subject positions and
sparse if any references to, for instance, gender,
race, sexuality, gender identity, disability and colo-
niality. Sometimes there might be individual chap-
ters or entries on some of these topics. Yet, rarely is
there an overarching commitment to think through
how patriarchy, colonialism, homophobia, trans-
phobia, gender norms, racism, ableism and more –
either individually or, even less often, in mutual
constitution – take and shape place.
This disciplinary state of affairs is disappointing,
frustrating and the cause of significant harm and dis-
comfort to many individuals. It is also a failure of the
critical capacities of the discipline in the face of its
own collectively accumulated evidence.
Think about scholarship on urban planning and
policy, economic development, global trade, mobi-
lities, technology, surveillance, incarceration, poli-
cing, health outcomes, reproduction, employment,
climate change, you name it. We have the research.
We know that access to space everywhere on earth is
societally unequal. We know that through all kinds
of policies, practices and discourses, a global minor-
ity is stripping a global majority of land, home,
shelter, privacy, public space, education, opportu-
nity, capital, nutrients, air, water, bodily autonomy,
freedom of movement, security, infrastructure,
health, comfort, kin, speech, resources, territory,
national belonging, time, possibility, dignity, life.
And we know that race, ethnicity, class, ability, citi-
zenship status, sexuality, gender identity and spe-
cies clearly influence all experiences and that
those who are produced and read as ‘normal’ take
up a disproportionate amount of everything. These
are the realities of our social, political, economic
and environmental conjuncture. They always have
been, and the situation in the world worsens every
day. So why, when we so desperately need to think
and act against-the-grain, is our discipline generally
content to maintain its status quo?
Dialogues in Human Geography 10(1)
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that geo-
graphers (like other scholars) are, as a group, very
good at maintaining untruths.
Consider the story of Anglo-American geogra-
phical thought as usually narrated in disciplinary
historical accounts. It goes like this. After centuries
of overtly colonial knowledge production, apoliti-
cal/conservative regional and cultural description
dominated the field through the first decades of the
20th century. Spatial science then changed the ter-
rain in the 1950s. Trained in ‘scientific’ methods,
the almost entirely male, white and western ‘space
cadets’, as they were known, embraced positivist
philosophy and utilized scientific methods to try to
decipher universal spatial laws. This, they hoped,
would gain human geography a reputation as a legit-
imate, rigorous, objective form of enquiry. Critiques
of this project were launched from within the disci-
pline in earnest in the late 1960s and 1970s with the
rise of radical/Marxist and humanistic geography.
These bodies of work brought concerns with polit-
ical relevance and social inequities (in the former
case) and human agency (in the latter case) to the
fore. But these approaches offered limited analyses
of embodiment, and they overshadowed work that
sought to think through the imbrication of class with
gender, race, nationality, sexuality and ability. In
response, these paradigms too were forcefully chal-
lenged when cultural geography was reworked in
the 1990s. Inspired in good measure by scholarship
coming out of the Centre for Cultural Studies at the
University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom,
and by a long overdue attention to the rise of identity
politics, as well as social (e.g. feminist, queer, race/
ethnicity-based organizing), anti-colonial and envi-
ronmental movements, geographers across various
sub-disciplines began rethinking culture as plural,
heterogeneous and shot through with power rela-
tions.2 Thus, a shift away from a narrow emphasis
on class-based differences and presumptions of uni-
versal subjecthood at last began in earnest within the
discipline, and many geographers turned to a wide
array of alternative conceptual frameworks for
insight and inspiration.
This is when I first encountered Anglo-American
geography, in the thick of its cultural turn. Having
not previously taken a ‘geography’ course, I
Oswin
stumbled across two books in a Halifax (Canada)
bookstore while wrapping up my master’s degree
in 1999: David Bell and Gill Valentine’s Mapping
Desire: Geographies of Sexuality (1995) and Nancy
Duncan’s BodySpace: Destabilising Geographies of
Gender and Sexuality (1996). I read these edited
collections and kept on reading. The new sexuality
and space work helped me realize that an explicit
spatial analysis was what I had been missing in
much of the queer theory literature I had been study-
ing. There were also the groundbreaking feminist
refutations of Cartesian ways of seeing and mascu-
linist modes of thinking about things like fieldwork,
subjectivity and the economy, the efforts to reckon
with the discipline’s materially and epistemically
violent history, the occasional challenges to the
dominant whiteness of the field, the reworkings of
urban theory through postcolonial and critical race
theory lenses, the political ecology literature that
broke down the nature/culture divide and, of course,
the efforts that sought to put all these frames into
conversation. These literatures are imperfect, to be
sure (for instance, the early sexuality and space and
feminist geographies literatures had easily apparent
white and western biases). But they disturbed the
foundations of disciplinary knowledge. They put
positionality, the politics of knowledge production,
the importance of embodiment and the everyday,
the permeable boundaries between the cultural, the
economic, the social and the political, and the inex-
tricability of both discourse and materiality as well
as identity and structure on the geographical agenda.
I have taught courses in ‘geographical thought’
almost every year for the past 15 years. That is, I
have taught this narrative over and over and over
again. Not uncritically, but nonetheless virtually
intact. And I only realized recently that this telling
is all wrong, that its emphasis is off in ways that
influence its disciplinary travels and responses. The
story goes, instead, as follows.
The drive by white supremacist heteropatriarchs3
to chart, map, exploit and extract from lands, peo-
ples, flora and fauna previously unknown to them
for their own early capitalist gain set geography into
motion as a discipline and embedded a disregard
and disdain for difference and social justice into the
fabric of geographical thought and practice. By the
11
20th century, when the earth was all mapped and
mostly claimed by some Europeans and their nation
states, and tensions among the global powers culmi-
nated in World Wars I and II, many geographers
then provided intelligence for military efforts. As
such, the region and the nation were added to the
globe as scales that geographers could expertly
advise upon and influence. Spatial science, that
effort to prove geography’s worth as an objective,
scientific endeavour, came directly out of the mili-
tary collaborations of the Second World War. In the
dawning era of late capitalism, the ‘space cadets’
used new computational capabilities to search for
spatial laws with an eye toward helping govern-
ments and businesses achieve economic efficiency.
As global capitalism was clearly becoming increas-
ingly reliant on and tied to cities, spatial science
research focused on this domain, thus expanding
existing geographical claims to expertise on the
globe, the region and the nation to the urban.
This brief re-narration cuts to the core aim of the
first few hundred years of Anglo-American/Eur-
opean geography. Groups of (almost entirely) white
men sought to carve up available terrain and
resources (human and animal, animate and inani-
mate), from the top on down. Yes, this account
could be nuanced with recognition of efforts to pur-
sue other lines of flight in the discipline – for exam-
ple, the Berkeley School of Cultural Geography, the
histories of female explorers and spatial scientists.
But these were minor notes that did little to undercut
(and had little to no interest in undercutting) imperi-
alism and militarism. Geography solidified as a dis-
cipline in Anglo-America and Europe through
structures of empire, military and capital to claim
space for a narrow band of persons.
This is what the cultural turn was up against, and
these structures, of course, persist today. Thus, our
collective disciplinary findings that access to space
in all forms and expressions are socially differen-
tiated. Nonetheless, it is commonly accepted in our
field that the cultural turn somehow set us free of
disciplinary biases. Not completely. Not yet. But
inexorably.
And it is not just geographers who are good at
misstating the facts. Geography’s liberal progress
narrative reminds me of other tall tales that have
12
shaped the study and scholarship of myself and
many, many others. There is, for instance, the one
about the ‘new world order’. During my undergrad-
uate studies in Toronto in the early 1990s, I took a
broad social science undergraduate degree, focusing
on fields like area studies, global politics, macro-
economics and international development studies.
We were in the immediate afterglow of such events
as the close of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the end of apartheid in South Africa, and
there was much discussion in my classes then of this
purported ‘new world order’. I learned from the
scholarly authorities at my ‘world-class’ university
that we were entering an era of unprecedented inter-
national cooperation and social movement activism
that would lead to planetary peace, prosperity and
freedom. I was also told that if my colleagues and I
pursued the right training, we could aid in the effort
of solidifying this trend through goodwill and ‘civi-
lized’ discourse. There is also the one about the
‘diversifying’ university. Simultaneously, in the
1990s, fields like women’s and gender studies,
sexuality studies and ethnic and racial studies were
becoming institutionalized as interdisciplinary
departments and programs in Toronto and many
other contexts, offering vital correctives to domi-
nant academic agendas and providing lifelines to
those on the social outskirts. Of course, I and others
did not question these narratives.4 For my part, I was
a white, settler, naturalized, middle class, able-
bodied, cisgendered, first-generation university stu-
dent who had spent almost every minute of my life
to that point in a small city and its surrounds in
northern Ontario. I was also a queer kid who had
barely survived a crushingly homophobic upbring-
ing. I was primed and ready and naı̈ve/privileged/
desperate enough to believe the assurances that the
academy could save me and others.
The optimism of elites in Canada and elsewhere
over the ‘new world order’ was misplaced and out of
touch, of course. A potent combination of liberal
hubris and white, male, western bias produced wide-
spread wilful ignorance of how the ongoing effects
of colonialism, capitalism, slavery, segregation and
more meant that the liberationist moments of the
day were coupled with persistent oppression and
insecurity for vast multitudes. While pundits crowed
Dialogues in Human Geography 10(1)
about bright futures on the horizon, they down-
played the suffering and premature death that
remained a predominant and preventable feature
of existence everywhere. They/we hyped the
appearance of change while allowing structural
oppression and exploitation to roll on such that,
today, selective destruction obviously continues.
The climate is changing. Vast numbers of species
of animal and plant life are extinct or verging on it.
Wealth is obscenely concentrated. Ethnic national-
ism, intolerance and hate are ascendant. Wars rage
in multiple theatres. ‘Identity politics’, the buoy for
so many ‘others’, is too often transformed in the
mainstream public imagination into a rallying cry
for fear-mongers and bigots. Plus, the university in
far too many places is now undoubtedly neo-liberal,
and evidence of the tenuousness of the foothold of
critical scholarship within the academy abounds,
especially when that scholarship directly challenges
racism, xenophobia, colonialism and settler coloni-
alism, heteropatriarchy and transphobia.
To be clear, I am personally doing just fine, in a
general sense. After a long time away, I am in Tor-
onto again, a tenured professor with a main research
and teaching focus on the geographies of sexuality
in relation to globalization and urbanization. I am
frustrated with the side-lining of queer theory and
the general inattention to sexuality in the discipline,
and I experience the sorts of professional macro-
and microaggressions that tend to come along with
researching and teaching ‘against-the-grain’.5 At
the same time, I have extraordinary privilege. I
am, as noted above, a white, naturalized, settler,
middle-class, able-bodied, cisgendered, queer
woman, and my queerness is mitigated by the fact
that Canada is homonationalist now.6 The field of
geography is doing generally just fine, too. What’s
more, it produces much important work. Although
contemporary global political, economic, environ-
mental and social realities are bleak, there are thank-
fully lots of pockets of challenge and contestation,
and critical geography is one such deep one. Across
human and physical geography, all the field’s sub-
disciplines, differing methodological preferences
and expertise, and national and/or linguistic divides,
many geographers generate knowledge with social
justice aims clearly in mind. But I as an individual
Oswin
and the rest of the members of the discipline of
geography (and beyond) are caught up in systemic
injustices, globally as well as institutionally and
disciplinarily.
It is a tremendous accomplishment that institu-
tional statements of support for equity and diversity
are today prevalent in many contexts and that some
academic institutions even seriously invest in the
achievement of these goals. Yet, the system is the
system – rigged, and the property of the few.7 An
abiding commitment to ‘meritocracy’ is unaccom-
panied by efforts to deal with the structural advan-
tages and disadvantages that determine access to
educational opportunities, academic positions and
research funding as well as influencing decisions
on hiring, tenure and promotion. Academic institu-
tions say they prize social relevance and impact,
while the pay-walled journal article is still held up
as the gold standard. Citation practices are selective
and skewed toward established authors, universities,
topics and canons. Research ethics board processes
stem egregious harms and help universities avoid
litigation down the line, but they stop well short of
considering the insidious harmful effects of even
well-intentioned research on ‘vulnerable’ commu-
nities. And institutions chase after academic–corpo-
rate–government partnerships often with little if any
concern for the politics and practices of the partners
or the university’s own complicity.8 So, geography
(like political science, sociology, art history, chem-
istry, biology, etc.) keeps on keeping on with its
skewed and unjust modes of knowledge production.
Marginalization, dismissal and erasure of ‘oth-
ers’ and their/our epistemologies thus stifle the crit-
ical geographical imagination into the present.
Epistemically, much geographical (and indeed
other) scholarship explicitly or implicitly holds on
to notions that social categories materialize in dis-
crete spatial forms, ascribes to a ‘biologic’9 and
considers social difference ‘epiphenomenal’10 or
beyond the scope of proper study. Whether perpe-
tuated deliberately or unwittingly, maliciously or
with the best of intentions, such misunderstandings
and mischaracterizations of empirical socio-spatial
realities serve to ghettoize, demean and dehumanize
individuals and communities deemed outside the
norm. Despite the richness of diverse communities
13
and cultures and ideas and lives, those on the mar-
gins are only barely possible subjects to those in the
mainstream of geography (and many other disci-
plines). Geography as a field does not prioritize the
material realities of differential embodiment. Epis-
temological pluralism too often amounts to episte-
mological unaccountability. ‘Others’ are set
artificially apart, rendered isolated objects of study
rather than knowledge co-producers, at best case
material rather than scholarly interlocutors. The
mainstream (within Anglo-American geography
and the academy at large) demands that those on the
outskirts spend our time and energy making our case
over and over and over again. It demands that we
keep generating knowledge to rescue liberalism
from itself while formidable structural and institu-
tional barriers inhibit knowledge transfer and actual
inclusion. It demands that subalterns speak while
allowing and encouraging hegemons not to hear.11
Nevertheless, many persist in efforts to carve out
an epistemological elsewhere.12 Indeed, from where
I sit it seems a new turn is underway within geogra-
phy and related disciplines. This turn is not unre-
lated to or uninformed by the 1990s’ cultural turn. It
is not of a piece with or a simple extension of it
either.13 What is going on today seems humbler,
angrier and more grounded than what we saw in the
1990s.
Consider scholarship arguing for ‘ethnographic
refusal’, for instance; work which, in short, rejects
the efforts of the white western academy to deter-
mine the grounds on which ‘others’ are judged
human or not. There is a long, illustrious lineage
of work in this vein, especially from feminists of
colour, Indigenous and queer of colour scholars,14
and it has been noticeably gaining steam in recent
years within critical scholarship and broader public
discourse. Further, think about the creation of the
Black and Latinx geographies AAG specialty
groups and the mutual support network they work
to provide (see Faiver-Serna, 2019). Or think of the
scholars calling out exclusionary or tokenistic cita-
tion practices (see Ahmed, 2014; Mott and Cock-
ayne, 2017). Finally, there is now a wealth of
scholarship in fields like Black, Latinx, Indigenous,
global south, feminist, queer and trans geographies
that shows clearly that social difference is not some
14
kind of multicultural side dish but the main attrac-
tion that is everywhere all the time. Not contained
and siloed. Everywhere. Working through each
body in many and varied forms.
As the epigraphs at the outset of this article attest,
this is hard and uncomfortable work. It is also vital
work. In this sort of scholarship, we get glimpses of
an alternate academy, of a turn toward and for each
‘other’. Not completely or easily or conclusively, as
we are up against formidable dividing mechanisms
and power and complicity have complicated maps,
but in tone and intention and effort. There is, I aver,
a growing creep of an other geography. Such work
fights forcefully against the guiding logics of the
status quo, guiding logics that produce such limiting
dualisms as us/them, margin/centre, major/minor
and civility/incivility. It recognizes that:
Of course all oppressed people have something in
common – their oppression. But the forms of that
oppression may vary considerably. And if those forms,
and the results they inflict on daily lives, vary, it fol-
lows that the needs and political strategies of groups
fighting for social change will differ from group to
group. (Delgado and Stefancic, 2001: 56)
It accepts and asserts the authority of those with
intimate knowledge of how dispossession, exploita-
tion and oppression work, of those who feel it on
their bodies and in their skin.
Again, the multiple projects of oppression and
exploitation that shaped the academy over earlier
centuries are still very much with us today. And
colonialism, imperialism, elitism, racism, xenopho-
bia, heteronormativity, cis-normativity, ableism and
more do not just persist. They are intensifying in
step with the new and extended geographies of
authoritarianism and populism that now shape
everything. The bodies of scholarship and their
authors that comprise this new and/or linked turn
are part of efforts to keep the terrors of these geo-
graphies at bay. They offer solace and protection
and represent the sort of change we need to see in
the world.
Academic change is not everything. But it is a
significant something. The academy is a resource,
so the powers that be – whoever those are in the
Dialogues in Human Geography 10(1)
reader’s particular institutional and national con-
text – are not just going to give it away. We can loot
it, though. As Harney and Moten (2013) argue, ‘the
only possible relationship to the university today is a
criminal one’.15 Every day and every moment in
these times, concerned scholars need to think about
how to use their access for the benefit of those who
do not have that access. It is not just about changing
our reading and writing practices, though that in
itself is an extremely important start. It is about
changing everything we do as scholars. It is about
unlearning privilege where we experience it. It is
about those on the margins not waiting for ‘permis-
sion to narrate’16 but speaking their/our own truths
in their/our own voices and for allies to help create
opportunities in which such speech is possible.17
It is about insisting that good intentions are not
enough and being ‘more impatient with each other’
(Tuck and Yang, 2012: 10) so that we might stop
wasting time and finally work together to get to
where we need to go. It is about supporting constel-
lations that shift and change and allow those closest
to a given harm or set of harms to take the lead on
diagnosing and challenging them. And this – all of
this – is far from easy. Acting in these ways always
and everywhere as a scholar – in our writing, in our
teaching, in our service and administrative work,
in our research practice – goes against the grain of
the academy that we rely upon for our livelihoods.
It makes us, following Harney and Moten (2013),
fugitives. And we must embrace this reality. Aca-
demic freedom, like every other social ‘good’, is
clearly under attack in different ways in different
places and grows more scarce every day. Geogra-
phers finally started talking in earnest about space
as relational and connected and shot through with
power relations back in the 1990s. This talk has
built slowly over time into actions with potential
to revolutionize the discipline and its worldly con-
nections. Let us galvanize these efforts. Let us
organize, mobilize and keep building an other
geography.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest
with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.
Oswin
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1. For more on this point, see Daigle (2019), Jazeel
(2019), Mahtani (2014), Mollett and Faria (2018),
Parker (2016) and Roy (2016).
2. See Anderson (1995), Bell and Valentine (1995),
Blunt and Rose (1994), Brown (1997), Christopherson
(1989), Deutsche (1991), Duncan (1996), Fincher and
Jacobs (1998), Gibson-Graham (1996), Jacobs (1996),
Katz (1996), Knopp (1992), Kobayashi and Peake
(1994), Massey (1991), Moore (1993), Nast (1994),
Rose (1993), Ruddick (1996) and Sanders (1990).
3. For work on the gendered and sexualized politics of
colonial practices, see Driskill et al. (2011), Oswin
(2019) and Stoler (2002).
4. For more on the university, the ‘new world order’ and
the institutionalization of ‘diversity’, see Ferguson
(2012) and Kamola (2019).
5. One individual incident that left an especial imprint is
the time when a senior white male authority figure
told me (I’m paraphrasing), ‘I’m ok with you being
gay [note: not a term I use in relation to myself], but
you speak too authoritatively in meetings’.
6. For sustained analyses of homonormativity and
homonationalism in relation to the United States and
its imperialist and militarist ambitions, see Duggan
(2003) and Puar (2007). On Canada as homonation-
alist, see Dryden and Lenon (2016).
7. See Harris’ (1993) brilliant analysis of property and
racial identity as interrelated concepts. Since race,
gender, sexuality and more are co-constituted forms
of domination, this argument has resonance for mul-
tiple modes of struggle in the academy and beyond.
8. For some critiques of the politics of higher education,
see Connell (2019), Harney and Moten (2013) and
Meyerhoff (2019).
9. I follow Katherine McKittrick here, who states that,
‘what happens when racial knowledge is mobilized
solely as a site of violation through which resistant
corporeal epistemologies are tasked with illuminating
the inequities that underwrite the production of
space? How are discussions of race and space and
knowledge tethered to an analytics of embodiment
15
that can only posit black knowledge as biologic
knowledge?’ (2016: 4).
10. For analyses of the ways that masculinist geographi-
cal knowledge production treats gender and race as
epiphenomena, see Deutsche (1991) and Christopher-
son (1989).
11. I am relying on Spivak ([1988] 2010) here, while tak-
ing obvious liberties. Of course, systems of subalterns
and hegemons, of winners and losers are not bounded,
abstract and universal but mutable, contextual and
situated. Disciplinary knowledge production, includ-
ing geographical knowledge production, is caught up
in these dynamics. Some of ‘us’, therefore, are much
safer and more secure than others, generally and in
certain times and places. And they/we often think and
act like it. Further, some of ‘them’ genuinely do not
mean to think and act, generally and in certain times
and places, in ways that perpetuate divisions and do
‘us’ harm. But they/we often end up doing so anyway.
The academy has shown widespread inability to take
privilege as seriously as it says it takes ‘vulnerability’;
it far too frequently fails to adequately address both,
and it in many ways works actively against efforts to
turn critical knowledge into radical action.
12. See Bhan (2019), Bledsoe and Wright (2019), Brown
et al. (2007), Cameron (2015), Catungal (2017),
Coombes et al. (2014), Delaney (2002), Doan
(2007), Eaves (2017), Gilmore (2002, 2007), Hub-
bard (2011), Johnson et al. (2007), Mahtani (2006),
McKittrick (2006, 2013), McKittrick and Woods
(2007), Nast and Pile (2005), Pratt (2004), Pulido
(2002, 2018), Raghuram et al. (2009), Sandoval
(2018), Simone (2010), Vasudevan (2019) and
Woods (2017).
13. For an excellent analysis of the haunting of contem-
porary critical scholarship by the 1990s, specifically
in relation to queer studies, see Amin (2016).
14. For example, see Coulthard (2014), Ferguson
(2004), McKittrick (2006), Minh-ha (1989),
Mohanty (1988), Moraga and Anzaldúa (2015),
Muñoz (1999), Simpson (2007), Smith (1999) and
Tuck (2009).
15. See also Chávez (2017), who takes up Harney and
Moten’s argument in relation to queer politics.
16. This phrase comes from Said (1984).
17. Allies – real allies – are key, that is, Allies who listen
and hear, who respect the authority of ‘others’, who
16
do not claim to have answers to questions they have
no experience with and who act with humility and
compassion. Allies who, in other words, help clear
the noise that gets in the way of coalitional building
rather than creating more of it.
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