Co-Motion: Re-Thinking Power, Subjects, and Feminist and Queer Alliances

In Co-Motion, theorist Paola Bacchetta proposes a new lexicon for analyzing power, subjects and alliances. Employing what she calls ‘theory-assemblages’ to describe how diverse theoretical and political approaches inspire movements and produce different kinds of alliances, Bacchetta engages the inseparability of power relations—such as colonialism, capitalism, racism, caste, misogyny, and speciesism—and how their combinations, operability, and the analyses they require, shift in different contexts and lives of subjects. Focusing on France, India, Italy, and the US from the 1970s to the present, Co-Motion addresses a wide activist, artivist, and social movement archive— group statements, banners, pamphlets, graffiti, posters, poetry, sit-ins, films, art exhibits—to think and feel with the many ways that people, historically and today, come together to act. Through her expansive engagement with varied bodies of scholarship, sites of analysis, and kinds of reading, Bacchetta offers new approaches to analyze, confront, and transforming power, and to enact freedom.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Openings 1
1. Co-Motion at Present 33
2. Imaginings Otherwise 70
3. Co-Formations, Co-Productions 103
4. Situated Planetarities 139
5. Other Sensings in Praxis 175
Appendix A. “Our Queer Pride Is Anti-Racist” 217
Appendix B. Pride for Whom? Pride for What? The Opportunism of Alliances and Visibility 219
Appendix C. Racialized Queers and Trans Against Homonationalism 223
Notes 225
References 231
Index 265

About the Author :
Paola Bacchetta is Professor and Chair in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at University of California, Berkeley. She is author or co-editor of multiple books, including Gender in the Hindu Nation and Fatima Mernissi For Our Times, Global Raciality, Right-Wing Women.

Review :
“In this stunningly original and thoroughly provocative book, Paola Bacchetta proposes a new critical vocabulary for grasping alliances, solidarities, and analytics of power. Co-Motion is an impressively thorough and synthetic survey of contemporary feminist and queer theories for thinking about social change and revolution beyond the borders that now restrict us—and toward a planetary scale.”—Mimi Thi Nguyen, author of The Promise of Beauty

“Bacchetta continues to be one of the most important intellectuals of this generation and this book demonstrates exactly why that is the case. Co-Motion creates a compelling and dense lexicon for understanding the present conditions and functionality of power within what she calls situated planetarities. As opposed to the global, a planetary approach is a powerful corrective to much contemporary scholarship on the global. It’s digestible and yet profoundly comprehensive.”—Karma R. Chavez, author of The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance