The dark times of neo­lib­er­alism are not only about the dev­ast­a­tion that hyper-​capitalism has un­leashed on the living and la­bouring “pre­cariat” (Guy Standing: 2011). It is also about the ways in which neo­lib­er­alism and its miso­gynist vi­cis­situdes in imperial-​militarism are ap­pro­pri­ating the agendas of left move­ments, marking the emer­gence of their own dark sides. Many left move­ments — par­tic­u­larly the queer and fem­inist move­ments — have been at the re­ceiving end of a soph­ist­ic­ated co-​option of their politics by the se­duc­tions of neo­lib­eral cap­ital and sec­ular law, es­pe­cially in post­co­lo­nial and set­tler co­lo­nial nation-​states.

Agency, autonomy and pleasure con­tinue to be the queer-​feminist eman­cip­atory buzzwords, just as their ar­tic­u­la­tion is being in­creas­ingly dec­or­ated in the cel­eb­ratory at­tire of in­di­vidu­ation and re­spons­ib­il­isa­tion (Cossman: 2007). In ad­di­tion, col­lective ac­tion in queer-​feminist politics, and its al­li­ances with other so­cial justice move­ments have been deeply frac­tured through neoliberalism’s as­saults, as well as through its com­pli­city in neo­lib­eral agendas. As a result, there is a sense of des­pair that has over­taken the ranks.
The com­pli­cities and con­tra­dic­tions of queer-​feminist politics de­mands a re­vis­iting of its po­s­i­tions as well as a taking ac­count of its fail­ures. This re­quires a com­mitted engagement in the task of asking and an­swering (at least at­tempting to) hard ques­tions: why have pro­gressive polit­ical pro­jects pro­duced so little in terms of change and transform­a­tion, while the neo­lib­eral market and state leg­alism ap­pears to be of­fering so much more to formerly stig­mat­ised and op­pressed groups? Is queer-​feminism partly to blame for the cur­rent dis­con­nect between the goals of its pro­gressive politics and the op­tions af­forded by the market? Have we reached a mo­ment when, as Janet Halley has written, it is time to take a break from fem­inism (Split Decisions, 2006)? Or is it time to take a break from spe­cific kinds of fem­inism? Anglo-​American Feminism? Dominance Feminism? Omnipotent Feminism? Should we also take a break from sim­ilar con­ser­vative avatars of queer politics: from queer im­per­i­alism? Queer Islamophobia? Queer racism? Queer ori­ent­alism? From ‘Pinkwashing’ and ‘Homonationalism’? (Puar: 2007; Schulman: 2012)

What are the pos­sib­il­ities then for queer-​feminist act­ivism and theory in ac­counting for failure: To what ex­tent do they re­main sites of both ex­cite­ment as well as trouble? While re­fusing to re­lin­quish en­gage­ment with the ter­rain of gender or sex, what the­or­et­ical pos­sib­il­ities exist to re­cap­ture the radical/​disruptive or af­fective di­men­sions of these notions? How do we re­think our politics in the neo­lib­eral aca­demic space while in­tel­lec­tu­ally en­ga­ging with queer-​feminism on the one hand, and serving the ends of global cap­ital on the other?

This in­ter­na­tional con­fer­ence seeks to ad­dress these con­cerns by en­tering into a con­ver­sa­tion about sex and gender politics in post/​set­tler co­lo­nial spaces, in neo-​liberal times. While law, leg­alism and the jur­idical will re­main some of the central sites of crit­ical in­quiry, the con­fer­ence is com­mit­tedly in­ter­dis­cip­linary in its orientation.

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