C. Heike Schotten
University of Massachusetts, Boston, Political Science, Faculty Member
- Political Philosophy, Feminist Theory, Feminism, Queer Theory, Queer Studies, Gender and Sexuality, and 36 moreRadical Political Theory, Political Theory, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Foucault, Black queer theory, Black Queer Studies and Queer of Color Critique, Black Queer Studies, Homonationalism, Pinkwashing Israel and Homonationalism, Homonormativity, Gender/sexuality, Race, Homonationalism, Lee Edelman, Jasbir Puar, Futurism, Palestine, Queer of Color Critique, Colonialism, Queer Theory and Queer Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Marxism, Settler Colonial Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Decolonial Thought, Critical Theory, Intersectionality, Gender, Postcolonial Studies, Empire, Radical Philosophy, Afropessimism, Cultural Studies, Critical and Cultural Theory, War on Terror, and Biopoliticsedit
- C. Heike Schotten is Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her res... moreC. Heike Schotten is Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests lie at the various intersections of queer theory, Nietzsche studies, biopolitics, the War on Terror, and liberatory critical theory. Drawing on each of these areas, her research theorizes the various meaning of and possibilities for liberation within the specific contexts of U.S. imperialism, U.S. settler colonialism, and historically still-hegemonic Euro-American constructs of knowledge and knowing.
Her first book, Nietzsche’s Revolution: Décadence, Politics, and Sexuality (Palgrave, 2009), argued for a re-reading of Nietzsche as the unlikely intellectual forebear of queer theory and, as such, an unwittingly revolutionary figure in his affirmation of the decay of traditionally raced and gendered bodies in 19th c. Europe.
Her second book, Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/queer-terror/9780231187473), uses queer theory to offer a reading of U.S. settler colonialism as, on the one hand, a specifically futurist formation of desire and subject formation and, on the other, the precursor and necessary ground of U.S. imperialism’s current chapter, the War on Terror. The unexamined hypermoralism of life and death that animates the “with us or against us” absolutism of “terrorism” discourse is a deliberately reactionary attempt to disqualify decolonization as nihilism and evil, a moralizing that can and must be read as a direct outcome of the United States’ unresolved status as an only “incompletely” “successful” settler project. Queer theory, then – as both a political project and a counterformation of desire – provides an unexpected if essential resource for liberatory resistance to U.S. imperial and settler formations.
Her current work expands in these directions, making explicit the radical/Left politics promised by queer theory’s 1990s origins and providing readings and applications of this radicalism to decolonization, on the one hand, and political opposition to morality and moralisms of all sorts, on the other.edit
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This article traces the emergence of what the author calls predation TERFism to the development of US Jewish-identified feminism and, in particular, Zionist lesbian separatism. This historical connection is reflected in the rhetorical and... more
This article traces the emergence of what the author calls predation TERFism to the development of US Jewish-identified feminism and, in particular, Zionist lesbian separatism. This historical connection is reflected in the rhetorical and ideological similarities between predation TERFism and Zionism, both of which are defined by an "extinction phobia" that confuses oppressor and oppressed, presenting the subordinate party as capable of eliminating the dominant one. This extinction phobia transforms into "right-wing annihilationism" via a dehumanization of the subordinate party as innately harmful and therefore requiring elimination; hence the hallmark predation TERF abjection of trans women as rapists of cis women and the Zionist abjection of Palestinians as "savage" and/or "terrorist." These connections can be obscured by the siloization of social justice movement work in the United States, wherein anti-colonial and anti-imperial organizing is often separated from organizing for gender and reproductive justice and sexual freedom. Recognizing the continuities, however-whether historical, material, or ideological-between predation TERFism and Zionism offers useful lessons for understanding not only the power of the contemporary global anti-trans resurgence, but also how we might build solidaristic, anti-colonial movements to defeat it.
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This article offers an emancipatory appropriation of Nietzsche’s work, making the case that the founding of the field of queer theory exemplifies and proffers a liberatory Nietzschean praxis of anti-morality. This argument requires... more
This article offers an emancipatory appropriation of Nietzsche’s work, making the case that the founding of the field of queer theory exemplifies and proffers a liberatory Nietzschean praxis of anti-morality. This argument requires reading Nietzsche’s work from the perspective of the oppressed and (re-)reading queer theory as part of the project of critical theory.
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This article provides an outline of the project of queer theory and the ways that this project has (and has not) engaged with the question of Palestine. Ultimately, the author argues that queer theory and Palestinian liberation share,... more
This article provides an outline of the project of queer theory and the ways that this project has (and has not) engaged with the question of Palestine. Ultimately, the author argues that queer theory and Palestinian liberation share, albeit perhaps unwittingly, a defining resistance to elimination and an enduring commitment to unsettlement. As such, queer politics is and can surely become decolonial praxis, just as decolonization has a clear affinity with dissident queer resistance.
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This article tracks Jasbir Puar’s term “homonationalism” as its meaning has transformed in her scholarly work as well that of Maya Mikdashi. I argue that homonationalism has evolved from its original formulation as, in part, a critique of... more
This article tracks Jasbir Puar’s term “homonationalism” as its meaning has transformed in her scholarly work as well that of Maya Mikdashi. I argue that homonationalism has evolved from its original formulation as, in part, a critique of politics, into, in its current guise, a diagnostic of international political relations. Although this transition offers insight into the international scene, I argue that homonationalism also loses its distinctiveness as a political formation in its own right as well as its critical capacity in the process. In particular, I argue that homonationalism becomes incapable of critically
evaluating activist strategies, practices and discourses of political resistance.
evaluating activist strategies, practices and discourses of political resistance.
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Reproduction, Feminism, Critique, and 24 moreAbortion, Sexuality Studies, Maternity, LGBT Studies, Homonationalism, Queer, Twentieth-Century Australian History, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Gender/sexuality, Race, Homonationalism, Feminist Research, IR Feminism, Identity Politics, Homonormativity, Queer Politics, Lgbtt Activism, Pinkwashing Israel and Homonationalism, LGBT politics, Feminist IR Theory, Sexual Exceptionalism, Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Israeli Pinkwashing, Queer Theory and Queer Studies, Queer IR, Lesbian and Gay History, Citrizenship, and Sexualtiy Gender and National Identity
Despite appearances, Agamben’s engagement with Foucault in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is not an extension of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics but ra-ther a disciplining of Foucault for failing to take Nazism seriously.... more
Despite appearances, Agamben’s engagement with Foucault in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is not an extension of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics but ra-ther a disciplining of Foucault for failing to take Nazism seriously. This moralizing rebuke is the result of methodological divergences between the two thinkers that, I argue, have fun-damental political consequences. Re-reading Foucault’s most explicitly political work of the mid-1970s, I show that Foucault’s commitment to genealogy is aligned with his commitment to “insurrection”—not simply archival or historical, but practical and political insurrection—even as his non-moralizing understanding of critique makes space for the resistances he hopes to proliferate. By contrast, Agamben’s resurrection of sovereignty turns on a moraliz-ing Holocaust exceptionalism that anoints both sovereignty and the state with inevitably totalitarian powers. Thus, while both Agamben and Foucault take positions “against” totali-tarianism, their very different understandings of this term and method of investigating it unwittingly render Agamben complicit with the totalitarianism he otherwise seeks to reject.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Totalitarianism, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Holocaust Studies, and 11 moreBiopolitics, Critique, Agamben, Holocaust, Biopolitics (in Agamben, Foucault and Negri), State of exception, Biopower and Biopolitics, The Holocaust, Exceptionalism, Jewish Responses to the Holocaust, and Foucault
This article argues that queer theory is useful for political theory in thinking about US empire and theorizing modes of resistance to it. In particular, it is argued that the work of Lee Edelman and Jasbir Puar can be appropriated for... more
This article argues that queer theory is useful for political theory in thinking about US empire and theorizing modes of resistance to it. In particular, it is argued that the work of Lee Edelman and Jasbir Puar can be appropriated for political theory and, when combined together into a single political project, help illuminate the temporal and sexual contours of US empire, providing crucial resources for theorizing “terrorism” and understanding it as an act of political resistance.
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This paper argues for a psychological understanding of Nietzsche’s categories of master and slave morality. Disentangling Nietzsche’s parallel discourses of strength, superiority, and spirituality in the first essay of On the... more
This paper argues for a psychological understanding of Nietzsche’s categories of master and slave morality.
Disentangling Nietzsche’s parallel discourses of strength, superiority, and spirituality in the first essay of On the
Genealogy of Morals, I argue that master and slave morality are better understood as ethical practices of the self than
as surrogates for either a binary classification of strength and weakness or a political demarcation of oppressor and oppressed. In doing so, I offer an application of this analysis to the horrific violence visited upon Gaza by Israel in its 2008-09 military assault.
Disentangling Nietzsche’s parallel discourses of strength, superiority, and spirituality in the first essay of On the
Genealogy of Morals, I argue that master and slave morality are better understood as ethical practices of the self than
as surrogates for either a binary classification of strength and weakness or a political demarcation of oppressor and oppressed. In doing so, I offer an application of this analysis to the horrific violence visited upon Gaza by Israel in its 2008-09 military assault.
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This article examines the scholarly preoccupation with the hypothesis that Nietzsche was gay by offering a reading of Nietzsche's texts as autobiographical that puts them in conversation with Euripides's drama The Bacchae. Drawing a... more
This article examines the scholarly preoccupation with the hypothesis that Nietzsche was gay by offering a reading of Nietzsche's texts as autobiographical that puts them in conversation with Euripides's drama The Bacchae. Drawing a number of parallels between Nietzsche, self-avowed disciple of Dionysus, and Pentheus, the main character of The Bacchae and demonstrated antidisciple of Dionysus, I argue that both men experience their sexual attraction to women as somehow intolerable, and they negotiate this discomfort—which is simultaneously an unjustified paranoia and fear of the feminine—through the appropriation of feminine capacities and qualities for themselves. This appropriation ultimately expresses these men's fear of the erosion of male power and the coherence of distinct gender categories that I call a “queer fear of the feminine.” However, this is neither a sign of incipient homosexuality nor a feminist move; rather, it is good old-fashioned patriarchy dressed up in drag. I conclude by offering a symptomatic reading of the popularity of the thesis that Nietzsche was gay, arguing that this reflects our own twenty-first-century tendency to read gender deviance as only ever a sign of sexual “orientation,” which is always already presumed to be homosexuality.
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In this article I argue that the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gloria Anzaldúa, and María Lugones can, taken together, offer a rich and innovative approach to understanding and realizing the possibility of revolution. From radically... more
In this article I argue that the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gloria Anzaldúa, and
María Lugones can, taken together, offer a rich and innovative approach to understanding and realizing the possibility of revolution. From radically opposed perspectives, both Nietzsche and Anzaldúa articulate the necessity of accepting contradiction and multiplicity as the conditions of political transformation, and offer a new conception of revolution that displaces mere reversal as its dominant meaning. Lugones supplies important tactical strategies for realizing this revolution in her suggestions of playful “world”-travel. Taken together, these three thinkers challenge radical critics to re-think not only the revolutionary project itself, but also their own position with regard to that project, and to the dominant order they seek to overturn.
María Lugones can, taken together, offer a rich and innovative approach to understanding and realizing the possibility of revolution. From radically opposed perspectives, both Nietzsche and Anzaldúa articulate the necessity of accepting contradiction and multiplicity as the conditions of political transformation, and offer a new conception of revolution that displaces mere reversal as its dominant meaning. Lugones supplies important tactical strategies for realizing this revolution in her suggestions of playful “world”-travel. Taken together, these three thinkers challenge radical critics to re-think not only the revolutionary project itself, but also their own position with regard to that project, and to the dominant order they seek to overturn.
Prostitution has been considered by feminists as, alternatively, a gendered relation, an issue of sexuality, and a kind of labor. In this paper, I argue for an integrated feminist analysis of sex work that focuses on the first and third... more
Prostitution has been considered by feminists as, alternatively, a gendered relation, an issue of sexuality, and a kind of labor. In this paper, I argue for an integrated feminist analysis of sex work that focuses on the first and third of these, leaving the second in the background. I argue that this reconstructed feminist analysis must reject the moralism and determinism of the gendered critique, and radicalize the economic critique. It must also, I suggest, orient itself toward consideration of prostitution as a symptom or function of various masculinities. In all cases, feminism has considered sex work as a question or problem of women’s agency and sexuality. Reversing this standard feminist approach offers important new directions for empirical research, and de-naturalizes prostitution as an inevitable feature of human life. This de-naturalization radicalizes the otherwise traditional policy debate over prostitution by allowing for a more revolutionary critique of the relations of domination which both govern and constitute sex work as a stigmatized, hierarchical, and exploitative practice.
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Nietzsche's hyperbolic rhetoric in Ecce Homo has been dismissed as megalomaniacal excess or a sign of his impending madness. By contrast, this essay argues it is essential to Nietzsche's autobiography, which may be more properly read as... more
Nietzsche's hyperbolic rhetoric in Ecce Homo has been dismissed as megalomaniacal excess or a sign of his impending madness. By contrast, this essay argues it is essential to Nietzsche's autobiography, which may be more properly read as the manifesto of his revolutionary corpus. The crucial difference between Ecce Homo and other manifestos, however, is Nietzsche's obsession with the proper performative articulation of himself, rather than his readers. The irretrievably unique character of the revolution he advocates, then, is a movement that, like his Zarathustra, is simultaneously a revolution for "all" and "none", and entirely because it is a revolution/revelation ultimately only of "one".
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eds. David Landy, Ronit Lentin, and Conor McCarthy. Zed Books.
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This chapter offers a critique of Wendy Brown's "Wounded Attachments" essay, taking left Nietzscheanism to task for naturalizing hierarchy and failing to explicitly side with the oppressed. In contrast, I suggest that queer theory's... more
This chapter offers a critique of Wendy Brown's "Wounded Attachments" essay, taking left Nietzscheanism to task for naturalizing hierarchy and failing to explicitly side with the oppressed. In contrast, I suggest that queer theory's appropriation of Nietzsche's critique of morality presents a more liberatory contribution to and basis for a left politics rooted in solidarity with the oppressed and the waywardness of desire.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Political Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Social Theory, Friedrich Nietzsche, and 10 moreDesire, Nietzsche, Social and Political Philosophy, Contemporary Political Philosophy, Contemporary Political Theory, Radical Political Theory, Radical politics, Wendy Brown, Wounded Attachments, and Queer Theory and Queer Studies
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A critical reading of the Nietzschean politics of the Walt Disney/Pixar film The Incredibles.
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Research Interests: History, Photography, Violence, Human Rights, Sovereignty, and 13 moreIsrael/Palestine, Palestine, Archives, Photography Theory, Modernity, History of Archives, Hannah Arendt, Empire, History of Palestine and Israel, Settler Colonialism & Its Legacies, Imperialism, Settler colonialism, and Colonialism and Imperialism
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https://sites.psu.edu/birthingthenation/gender-panics-zionism-the-right-wing-politics-of-extinction-phobia/ Presented as part of the Sawyer Seminar at Penn State University: Birthing the Nation: Gender Sex and Reproduction in... more
https://sites.psu.edu/birthingthenation/gender-panics-zionism-the-right-wing-politics-of-extinction-phobia/
Presented as part of the Sawyer Seminar at Penn State University: Birthing the Nation: Gender Sex and Reproduction in Ethnonationalist Imaginaries.
Presented as part of the Sawyer Seminar at Penn State University: Birthing the Nation: Gender Sex and Reproduction in Ethnonationalist Imaginaries.
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https://countercurrents.org/2021/05/on-the-insidious-discourse-of-terrorism-in-the-us-and-how-it-functions-to-demonize-palestine-advocates-and-muslims/
Interview by Rima Najjar.
Interview by Rima Najjar.
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https://www.bdsmovement.net/news/us-bds-activism-reaches-third-rail
A dispatch/report in the wake of the American Studies Association's historic vote to uphold the academic boycott of Israel.
A dispatch/report in the wake of the American Studies Association's historic vote to uphold the academic boycott of Israel.
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https://mondoweiss.net/2013/05/means-jewish-justice/
A critique of Jewish-identified Palestine solidarity work in the U.S.
A critique of Jewish-identified Palestine solidarity work in the U.S.
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https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/27175/Queers-Resisting-Zionism-On-Authority-and-Accountability-Beyond-Homonationalism A critical response to Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi's "Pinkwatching and Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and Its... more
https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/27175/Queers-Resisting-Zionism-On-Authority-and-Accountability-Beyond-Homonationalism
A critical response to Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi's "Pinkwatching and Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and Its Discontents"
A critical response to Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi's "Pinkwatching and Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and Its Discontents"
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https://mondoweiss.net/2012/11/counting-the-gaza-dead-false-equivalences-distorted-dichotomies/
A critique of disaggregating Palestinian deaths by gender.
A critique of disaggregating Palestinian deaths by gender.