The biopolitics of settler colonialism: right here, right now

Settler colonialism is exemplary of the processes of biopower theorised by Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. However, settler colonialism remains naturalised within theories of biopower and theories of its relation to coloniality. White supremacist settler colonisation produces specific modes of biopolitics that sustain not only in settler states but also in regimes of global governance that inherit, extend, and naturalise their power. I extend Patrick Wolfe's theory that a 'logic of elimination' constitutes settler colonialism in the genocide and amalgamation of Indigenous peoples, by indicating that this also indigenises and naturalises white settler nations as projections of the West. Agamben's work illuminates how Indigenous peoples are eliminated in a state of exception to Western law, which by functioning to erase consanguinity---as the patriarch in Roman law eliminates the defiant son---explains Indigenous peoples' seemingly contradictory incorporation within and excision from the body of white settler nations. This biopolitical process specific to settler colonialism also structures the manner in which white settler societies demonstrably universalize Western law, both within their bounds and in global arenas. My call to denaturalise settler colonialism in social theory is but a first step towards broader study of how the biopolitics of settler colonialism structure current modes of biopower and require concerted critique at the intersections of Indigenous and settler colonial studies

Theorising gender, sexuality and settler colonialism: an introduction

'Hoke-tee', the cover image offered to this issue by Taskigi/Dine artist Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, presents a protean site for considering how our contributors advance theories of settler colonialism. Taken from the series Portraits of Amnesia, 'Hoke-tee' portrays juxtapositions that interrupt any narrative of the moon as terra nullius. Whose human existence becomes legible once the moon appears as a site traversed by humans: in body, but also in memory, or in history? We know his---a white heteropatriarchal national manhood achieved here by having mined rare earths, fabricated massive technologies, and invested in capital's projection to send him and his white brethren to this place. But what crosses the frame, unnoticed by a gaze he directs always forward, and elsewhere: a child, whose dress may be elevating, whose chair may be transporting a historical awareness and multi-generational presence long-defiant of his Manifest Destiny

Queer settler colonialism in Canada and Israel: articulating Two-Spirit and Palestinian queer critiques

This essay plies potential connections among Two-Spirit and Palestinian queer critiques to advance a comparative analysis of queer settler colonialism in Canada and Israel. A broad literature in indigenous studies and at its intersections with queer studies now centres the intellectual and political interventions of Indigenous LGBTQ/Two-Spirit people in North America. In turn, after years of organising among Palestinian LGBTQ people in Palestine, Israel, and the diaspora, a broad array of queer critiques of gender and sexuality in Israel/Palestine recently has appeared in social movements and scholarship. This essay compares Two-Spirit and Palestinian queer critiques so as to newly examine the sexualisation of settler colonialism in Canada and Israel. The essay cites an extensive literature on queer settler colonialism in the Americas, and its comparability with queer Palestinian critiques, to illuminate the specificity of queer settler colonialism in Israel. An extended analysis of Eytan Fox's 2006 film The Bubble assists in diagnosing the complicities and investments in settler colonialism that characterise contemporary Israeli LGBTQ politics. The essay concludes by demonstrating how such comparisons deepen knowledge of the relational formation of settler colonialisms, and of their inherently gendered and sexualised formation