Infrastructural Enfleshments: Queer Theory on Bodies with(out) Infrastructures

Keywords: infrastructure, body, queer theory, subjectivity, biopolitics
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 21

Abstract

In this article, I explore how mega-infrastructures (re)order social life and its everyday, embodied (im)possibilities of liveability. Both geographical and anthropological scholarships on sociality of infrastructure predominantly focus on “citizenship” or states’ “publics”, with these conceptual lenses functioning as primary frameworks of socio-political belonging – either provided by the state or demanded by popular contestation to be included into the national body politic – through which multifarious effects of infrastructure are analysed. In the article, I diverge from these literatures: I contend that in fundamentally unequal socio-political contexts (often characterised by marginality, abjection, and social effacement), a relationship between infrastructure, citizenry, and socio-political belonging cannot be taken as a given. Instead, relying on materiality of a body as a primary scale of analysis, in the article I examine what I call infrastructural enfleshments – how infrastructures intersect with a social subject by reconstituting embodied hierarchies of gender and sexuality that enflesh (im)possibilities of a dignified life for bodies that live with, without, and in shadows of mega-infrastructures. Doing this, in the article I have two primary aims. First, I intend to demonstrate a profoundly intimate relationship between infrastructure, governance, and biopolitics manifesting in, and constituting, differently capacitated bodies. Second, I show how queer theory’s approaches to a fundamentally embodied nature of social life are analytically useful to make sense of material politics of infrastructure, where gendered and sexed lives are never explicitly acknowledged, but, nevertheless, form a part of power vectors through which mega-infrastructures function as modes of (bio-/geo-)politics.