 Welcome to this School of Security Studies, EDI Committee and Department of War Studies sponsored event, a conversation with Dr. Ravel Rao about his fabulous new book out of time, The Queer Politics of Post-Coloniality. My name is Dr. Aggie Hurst. I'm a senior lecturer in international relations theory and methods here in the Department of War Studies. And I am immensely grateful and thrilled to introduce Dr. Rao, who will be in conversation with me this afternoon. A few housekeeping notes. First of all, we're absolutely keen to get your insights and comments and questions as we move along. The chat function will be live throughout. So please do type away any responses, questions, follow-up thoughts. We'll be very happy to unmute you and bring you into the conversation with us as we proceed. The conversation is going to be structured by a series of prompts and questions that I'm going to ask Dr. Rao. But I think as these things normally do, we will veer off into all sorts of segues and byways as we see fit in the course of the session. So a very warm welcome from myself and from the Department and from the EDI Committee. We're thrilled to be celebrating LGBTQ plus history month and this event is our flagship celebration thereof. I'm very happy to introduce Dr. Rao, who is a reader in political theory at SOAS. He is the author most recently of the book we're discussing today out of time, The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality. He also has a second fabulous OUP book, Third World Protest Between Home and the World. He is a member of the Radical Philosophy Collective and blogs at the Disorder of Things. His research interests and international relations, postcolonial and queer theory, gender and sexuality and South Asia. It's an absolute pleasure to welcome you, Dr. Rao. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Agni, and everyone else who's organized this. Brilliant stuff. We have quite a number of folks on the call already and I can see that a few are continuing to join as we speak. But I think we will kick off with the first question that I have to pose to you. In Out of Time, your fabulous new book, you address a seemingly irresolvable contradiction. And one of the things I really enjoy about this book is that you don't shy away from but rather seek to interrogate a whole host of really fascinating contradictions. So the first contradiction I want to explore with you is the following. How does queerness appear to be both anti-colonial on the one hand and also complicit with imperialism and coloniality on the other hand? So could you expand a bit on that tension and how you kind of addressed that and what conclusions you arrived at about that in your book? Sure. So it's probably useful for people who've just joined us to know that the book is centrally about the politics of the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act, which was a very draconian piece of legislation that was introduced in the Ugandan Parliament in 2009 and briefly became law in 2014. It attracted attention almost immediately because of the draconian nature of its provisions, some of which proposed the death penalty for some categories of offenses, but also because it was said to have been passed partly at the behest of US-based Christian evangelicals who'd been lobbying for the passage of anti-homosexuality legislation in different parts of sub-Saharan Africa around the early years of the 2000s and from then onwards. But coming to your question about how we locate queerness in relation to imperialism and anti-imperialism, one of the most common tropes in queerphobic discourse, not just in Uganda, but in many parts of the Global South is this idea that queerness is culturally inauthentic. It's an import, it's something that is brought in by Western cultural imperialism, which was a trope that I wanted to interrogate. And one way I do this is by going back in time to revisit a story that's very well known in Uganda. It's the story of the last pre-colonial ruler of the kingdom of Uganda, which is the largest of the pre-colonial kingdoms that were merged to form what is today Uganda. The story of this king briefly is that he is believed to have had sex with men in his court till the Christian missionaries arrived, both Anglicans and Catholics, and begin to convert some of the elites in the kingdom to Christianity, at which point they internalized the idea that same-sex intimacy is a sin. They refuse the king his sexual advances, and he has them put to death for their political treason, but perhaps also their sexual betrayal. And this culminates in a series of civil wars, which end with the Protestant faction emerging triumphant with the help of the British, which then establishes the British protectorate of East Africa, of Uganda. What's interesting about this moment is that this supposed instance of same-sex desire is at the heart of a set of events that results in the establishment of Western imperialism. In this situation, the queer king is really an anti-imperialist figure who resists British advances, ultimately unsuccessfully, and is overthrown as a result of his inability to resist that advance. So it's very ironic that Ugandan elites, but also elites in sub-Saharan Africa, more generally today, associate queerness with imperialism and Western imperialism, when in fact we might say that queerness was stamped out by this earlier 19th century instance of Western imperialism. So I'm interested in the way queerness shifts position between being on the side of anti-imperialism in one historical moment and on the side of imperialism in the other and in tracing the ways in which that shift takes place, which is obviously a long, complicated story spanning 140 years or something like that. In a way, I suppose you could say, I'm telling a historical story in a very situated context that arrives at a similar insight to Jaspi Puar's idea in terrorist assemblages that queerness splits into formations that are complicit with imperialism and formations that are seen as antithetical to it. And I suppose I'm telling a kind of long-duration story of how that plays itself out in colonial and post-colonial relations. Fantastic, that's really great to contextualize the intervention that you're making and we'll come on to some of them, your kind of agreements and disagreements with Puar a little bit later. I mean, one of the things that I really enjoy about the book is that you seem to weave together this capacity to kind of soar into the theoretical stratosphere at the same moment of remaining very grounded and very kind of human and very interested in these kind of interpersonal and intimate relations. I wanna ask you secondly a bit more about this notion of queerness and how you conceptualize it in your work. You talk about it as kind of comprising a series of antithetical kind of imperatives as you've just laid out. It's about both anti-imperialism and imperialism. It has connotations of paganism and subversion and at the same moment with Christianity and the whiteness and boyfiness. It has connections with caste and with subordination and domination in those realms. And you also link it very interestingly, I think, to temporality and the temporarily kind of primitive figure. So in that sense, your use of queerness, it's doing a very interesting series of tasks. It's relentlessly mutable. It's resisting ontologization and totalization. But what characterizes queerness for you and what's kind of politically important about it? So I think I tend to resist defining queerness because I think there is something anti-queer about that search for fixity and definition. But I suppose I would start by saying it's tended to be used in some inconsistent and contradictory ways in the literature. So on the one hand, queer is used as a kind of umbrella term for all non-normative sexual identitarian formations. That's ironic because queer theory emerged as a critique of identity politics in the first place. But I think the position that I probably am most comfortable with is the idea of queerness as a positionality of non-normativity in relation to all sorts of things rather than an identity category. So what I'm trying to think about here is the way in which, what is it that's seen as queer in a particular situation? I start very much with gender and sexuality as the framing context of the book, I think, makes clear. And I then try and follow a series of global reverberations that this anti-homosexuality act is having, both in the politics of Uganda, but then also in the wider politics of Anglican Christianity as well as Pentecostal Christianity and Catholicism. These are the three major Catholic Christian denominations in Uganda. And then I look at some other reverberations in relationships between Uganda and donor countries, such as Britain, which is also the former colonial power, which gives it a different valence. And finally, between Uganda and international financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. So the book kind of shifts from one scene of encounter to another as we go from one chapter to the next. And in each of these situations, I found that although we were ostensibly talking about gender and sexuality, it seemed as if the conversation about queerness became about something else. So in the British context, when British activists are contemplating Britain's sort of historic responsibility in imposing anti-queer laws in former colonies and what obligations follow from that historic fact, it often seemed to me, and I try and show in that chapter, that sexuality is discussed very much through the prism of race or is read in certain contexts by certain figures as a kind of homosexuality is read as whiteness, really, in those spaces that I'm looking at in that chapter. In a different context, in conversations with the World Bank and international financial institutions, sexuality is very much mediated through the prism of class and queerness is seen to portend the kind of embougement. It's seen to signify a kind of class mobility, particularly in global South societies. And this is very much the length through which the World Bank and the IMF, insofar as they are interested in sexuality, talk about it. So the question became, why does queerness seem to mutate when it's refracted through these different institutional arrangements? And I use Hortenspiller's work to suggest that, in particular her very famous article, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe, which is subtitled a grammar, an American grammar book. And I became really interested in this idea of grammar. What does it mean for a state or an institution or a society to have a grammar? Spiller's very much locates that grammar in the kind of traumatic foundational and births, alternation or the institution or whatever set of arrangements we're talking about. And so what I think is happening here is that each of these institutional arrangements has this kind of foundational grammar through which when queerness is refracted, it comes out on the other side, looking like race or caste or whatever most object category that particular grammar has created. And that's why I think it seems to mutate in these different scenes that encounter into something else, even though we're always talking about gender and sexuality ostensibly in all of these situations. That's so interesting. It suddenly strikes me then that can we think of queerness as something like the kind of constituted outside of whatever the kind of hierarchical or binary or dichotomous kind of power relation we're talking about. But somehow as you say, it's racialized and gendered and associated with all sorts of material and immaterial power relations. I suppose the joy of queerness is then that celebration of being the constitutive or disruptive remainder or outside. Absolutely one metaphor that occurred to me while I was writing the book was and I sort of hesitate to use this because I think medicalization metaphors can be very problematic because they do all kinds of other things. But I began to think of queerness as a kind of, you know, these dyes that I injected to reveal the health of the body or the lack thereof. In that sense, queerness was an analytic that was illuminating, as you say, the kind of abject outside as well as what was not the inside and the outside. And I think discussions of queerness have a way of doing that. They have a way of throwing into relief what is outside the particular formation that we're thinking about. Fantastic, that's great. And it makes me think of Cindy Weber's work around this as well, obviously. And some of her comments about queerness, not as something you are, but as something you do, but then queerness always has a practice to it. It always has a movement or a function or some sort of interruptive or some sort of property to apprehend and destabilize. It's not something that just rests sort of solidly in a person or a thing, but rather is expressive and dynamic. Great, I'll pause there and just see if we have any comments or questions around this theme of queerness from our audience, our attendees. Anybody like to either indicate they would like to say something by saying something in the chat or if we have a raise hand function, I think not, but it would be great to have any engagements on this question of queerness. What is it where is it to be found? And what do we think of Dr. Rao's framing here as this sort of anomalous simultaneity, both attached to imperial forces and kind of anti or counter imperial forces, too. If not, no problems, we can move on. Do post things in the chat as we go, as I've said. I believe our fabulous tech wizards are able to unmute folks as well. So please do participate. It would be great to hear your thoughts as we go along. Good, so we talked a bit, I think, about some of the conceptual dimensions, although as I say, the book is both kind of very empirical and warm and human, but very sophisticated in its theoretical contribution throughout. But of course, your own work and your own background is also in kind of activist circles. And so one of the things you do in the book is offer a kind of critique in some instances of some of the more mainstream LGBT politics, which as you put it, seeks inclusion rather than the deconstruction of hegemonic structures of state, nation, and the market. So how in your view do these more conventional LGBT movements inadvertently sort of serve to consolidate the status quo? And what can we learn from those unwittingly productions, do you think? I'm not sure it's always unwitting. I think sometimes these are quite conscious strategies of advancement within the world as it is currently constituted. I think the last two chapters of the book offer two ways of thinking about these strategies for emancipation and advancement. So in the penultimate chapter, where I try and outline this ideological formation that I call homo-capitalism, I talk about the ways in which elite queer activists in association with international financial institutions like the bank and the IMF have pioneered a new kind of strategy of persuasion where in contrast to homo-nationalism, which berates states and societies that don't recognize LGBT rights for their supposed barbarism, in this new discourse of homo-capitalism, what we see is a kind of a seduction of such states and societies and assurance that if they were to recognize LGBT rights, they would enjoy the fruits of growth and prosperity and so on and so forth. So the World Bank has been pioneering a series of studies about how a country's GDP will supposedly expand by X percent every time it recognizes a new LGBT right. And these studies are quite quantitative. So I'm not being crude and reductive in describing them in this way. I think what's going on here is the promise of joining capitalism, the promise of a kind of liberal futurity where if subjects constitute themselves in particular ways, they will enjoy recognition and the part of the family, quite literally the nation, the market, all of these structures that promise the good life in a liberal sense. And I contrast that in the last chapter with a very different strategy that trans activists in India are pursuing, which comes out of the particular legal constitutional and political history of the Indian state. Specifically, what's happening here is that trans communities have appealed for judicial recognition of backward class status. Now that might sound odd to anyone not steeped in this kind of constitutional lexicon, but this is a category that really has arisen out of the history of caste subordination. It's a legal and constitutional category, which means that a group that is recognized as backward can avail of the affirmative action provisions in Indian constitutional law. So what trans communities are doing here is they're analogizing themselves with subordinate caste communities and trying to avail of the welfare and affirmative action provisions of the constitution. But in doing this, rather than seeking to climb up a ladder, this is not a strategy of upward mobility or at least not in the way that homo-capitalism would suggest. It's an attempt to make common cause with those at the bottom of the social ladder, with a view to dismantling that ladder. In the words of the leading Dalit visionary and thinker Ambedkar, his most famous essay is called Annihilation of Caste. So this is a kind of abolitionist agenda rather than one that seeks advancement within structures as they are currently constituted. Great, I think that was really helpful and makes a lot of sense. I think one of the things that we learn when we kind of dig into a certain subject matter or topic is that one of the problems, whether it's coloniality or heteronormativity is that oftentimes people flatten out the kind of milieu and assume there's just one sort of line that is told or one campaign that everyone agrees on and actually the LGBTQ plus communities are extremely diverse, some very reformist and very much seeking recognition and participation and access to existing structures and institutions and others much more subversive or radical or critical of the prevailing order. Okay, fantastic. Again, just actually as I think about it, for those who haven't yet read the book, it is now available in paperbacks. I'm gonna pop a link in the chat there as well. And I believe there's a link to read online through that link as well as we go through. Okay, brilliant. Let's move on then. I mean, part of what you're touching there on there, I think, when we think about the kind of the radical or the critical kinds of interventions that the LGBTQ movements can make. And one of the things that's really interesting is that following, but also critiquing the kind of intersectional move which we'll talk about shortly, you explicitly link queer questions and post-colonial questions. One of the things that you say in the book is that for a post-colonial intervention to really do its job, it needs to engage in the kind of messy, critical task of determining how responsibility for ongoing oppressions must be a portion between colonial and post-colonial regimes. So again, you resist the temptation to kind of homogenize or flatten out the communities that you're researching. There is not one queer identity, there is not one type of activist group. And so what you talk about in the book quite centrally, I think, is this idea that the project of decoloniality itself might possibly become a kind of vehicle for the politicization of homophobia that somehow even as we try to do good decolonial work, we can reinforce certain kind of heteronormative or homophobic tropes. And one example that you give in the book is this idea of homo-romanticism. I'd love you to say a bit more about that. You talk about the ways in which kind of if we romanticize a pre-colonial kind of safe or pure space, we actually reproduce certain nativist tropes, certain denials of agency. And again, we impose Western assumptions and categories of queerness onto, in this case, Asian and African contexts. So why do you take this position? Could you tell us a bit more about it? Yeah, so this is maybe where it's useful to, at least for me, to build a thread between my previous book and this one, because the question I was really interested in Third World Protest was I was most taken up by figures in the anti-colonial canon who were, of course, fervent anti-colonialists, but were also very alert to the pitfalls of nationalism to use the title of one of Fanon's chapters in the wretched appeal. That is to say, thought of nationalism as necessary, but also as problematic because of the forms of self-disciplining and self-censorship that engendered. And so the particular figures I look at there are probably quite an idiosyncrasy group, but I was interested in Edward Said, Rabindranath Tagore from the Indian independence generation, James Joyce and Fanon himself. And what was intriguing about all these figures was that they were both engaged in the anti-colonial struggle, but also critical of the dominant forms in which that anti-colonialism was being expressed. And I think I take that sensibility into this discussion because what I was interested in here was, of course, I was seeing very strong elements of what Puwara is called homo-nationalism, where the world was being divided into zones that were characterized as queer-friendly and those that were seen as homophobic. But I found that precisely because the critique of homo-nationalism had now been so well understood, people were beginning to overcorrect for it. So what I mean by that is that what seemed to happen in the criticism of homo-nationalism was that the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act was now entirely blamed on the activities of US-based evangelical Christians. As if the Ugandan players in this had no agency whatsoever or no responsibility for what was going on in their own country. And then I was beginning to see Ugandan writers like Silvia Tamale themselves kind of getting irritated with this discourse in which Ugandan agency had been completely evacuated from the way in which this story was being told. And so the question became, how do we account for these instances of politicized homophobia without lapsing into a kind of orientalist homo-romanticist, a homo-nationalist language? And so this is where the critique of the opposite tendency that I call homo-romanticism, which is a way of romanticizing the post-colonial nation as uniquely queer-friendly until Western colonialism comes along and installs homophobic law. I wanted us to be curious about the forms of normativity and non-normativity that might have preceded the advent of any kind of Western colonial contact, much less in position. I think you can actually see this in Said's orientalism. When Said defines orientalism, he does it in two ways, but he pays far more attention to one than the other. So one kind of orientalism is a discourse in which the orient is denigrated as backward and barbaric and savage. And that's the kind of orientalism that I think we paid far more attention to in post-colonial theory. But a different kind of orientalism, he said, was one in which the orient was overvalued for its spirituality, for its... This is the kind of noble savage view of the orient as uncorrupted by the depredations of Western modernity and so forth. He doesn't pay as much attention to that, but I find the counterpart of that facet of orientalism in this discourse that I call homo-romanticism, which I think is equally damaging or differently damaging because it doesn't see how Ugandans have authored, co-authored in collaboration with Western interlocutors some of the outcomes that I was trying to explain. I think that that's so well put. And I think one of the tensions that we always have when we try to research something, a place or a time, which is not our own, is that there is that tension to kind of insert the problem that actually, how it's not that it wasn't the colonizers that brought this, it was there before, or it's not that colonialism brings homophobia and it was a paradise before. And of course, it's always messier than that and always more complicated than that. And so I think you do a really exceptional job in the book of not shying away from those tensions. It would be so easy to say, colonialism is the problem. It did a heck of a lot of harm. But the problems of society and power relations don't start and stop with colonialism. They exacerbate a whole bunch of things in very particular ways, but actually tensions and violence and all that stuff is always already part of a human condition whenever and wherever you are. And I think you do a really good job of excavating that. If I can just pick up the decolonial homophobia a bit, because I think that's an interesting phrase and I haven't heard anything about that. The particular context in which that seemed apparent to me was the politics of the Anglican church, which is this remnant of British imperialism. Anglican churches exist in all of those countries that were part of the British empire. And Uganda is one of those. What's happening in the transnational politics of the communion is that as conservatives in countries like the US, UK and Canada are beginning to lose the culture wars on their home turf, they're trying to establish these transnational alliances with conservatives in what are beginning to be more important provinces in the Anglican communion, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda as well. And the idea is that by creating these global alliances, they might thwart any kind of progressive moves towards the ordination of women as bishops or same-sex marriage and so on in global non-setting fora. The way in which these alliances have been explained is that to put it quite crudely, the global North conservatives give global South congregations and parishes money in return for votes. And I think that materialist understanding is plausible, but it's also inadequate in part because it represents the African clergy in these transactions as acting purely out of materialist considerations. Simply ready to sell their votes to the highest bidder. It doesn't pay attention to their theological beliefs. And there is a kind of racist condescension in the way in which those figures are positioned in that critique. What I found was something a little bit different, which is that this was the first moment in the history of the Anglican communion in which African voices were being taken seriously by white Western conservatives. For their own purposes. So in a sense, it was a kind of decolonial moment, except the issue on which African voices were allowed to express themselves was this one. And the kind of African voice that white conservatives were interested in were those that were predisposed towards anti-queer views. So it is a kind of decolonial moment, but not quite. It's a decolonial moment, in the sense that African voices have more weight, but the particular ways in which that voice is exercised are not necessarily emancipatory for Ugandan queers. And so it's trying to sort of bring out the contradictions. You know, all good things don't march together, in a sense. It's trying to bring out the contradictions between this democratizing, but illiberal kind of politics. I think, as I say, I think you do the most amazing job of that in the book. I struggle to think of a text which so kind of resolutely refuses to back away from pushing at those contradictions, rather than sort of quietly resolving them in one way or another. So it's impossible to skip sections of this book, I found. That, you know, sometimes when you're trying to prep to something and you're trying to read at pace, you're sort of like, I'll move this bit to one side. You can't do that with this book, which is, I think, you know, a mark of, it makes me think of, was it Adorno who talked about the kind of, you know, every sentence must be kind of home to perfection and precision. There's nowhere, there's no kind of get-out clause of shortcuts. And it feels like that's been done here in a really interesting way. Good, I'll pause now again just to see if anybody wants to pipe up. I know it's not always easy, certainly to be the first person to pose a question. So I'm going to pause here for a second. I'm going to be the first person to pose a question and our strange separateness from one another makes it harder still. But do make yourself known if you would like to come in and say anything in the Q&A or in the chat box too. We would love your thoughts on our conversations so far. Maybe we're answering all the questions in advance and doing some useful work there. Good. Well, in the absence of any other questions, we can move forward a little bit. You brought up some of the interesting points there. I'm tempted to kind of go off in a different direction. I mean, one thing you do mention in the book, kind of recent events in the kind of Theresa May's activities, for example, in kind of encountering certain, but not all dimensions of kind of Britain's imperial hangover and kind of doing some work to signal responsibility or trying to make amends, of course, while not kind of fully interrogating the extental or other elements of empire and slavery. Can you maybe tell our audience a bit about what the conservatives have done in recent years and how this sort of sits with your analysis? Yeah, so one of the results of global South activists. So let me start with what the nature of the conversation is in Uganda and India. So Uganda and Indian queer activists get cooked. And the reason I focus on those two countries right now is because they're sort of at the center of the book. Get told that homosexuality is Western. They respond by saying, actually, it's these homophobic laws that have come to us from outside through colonial penal codes. And that's true as a matter of legal history. In both these countries, anti-queer laws are remnants of colonial penal codes. Now that very forceful reminder by global South activists has generated a discourse of atonement in Britain, where British LGBT activists have been saying, well, what do we do with this knowledge, with this thing we've always known, but it seems to impose a kind of responsibility on Britain. And that sense of responsibility has reached the highest levels of British government. So in 2012 and 2017, there were debates in the House of Lords and the House of Commons, respectively, on the global LGBT situation, the extent to which Britain has some culpability for the anti-queer laws under which queer people elsewhere continue to live and be incarcerated and so forth. And it generated this quite interesting discourse of atonement and contrition for colonialism. So if you read these debates, you hear white conservative lords getting up one after the other and these debates to apologize for the toxic legacies of colonialism. Now that's great, but it's also astonishing because you don't see these kinds of expressions of apology for other dimensions of colonialism. So what I do in chapter four of the book is to juxtapose these debates with the kind of debate that happened on the bicentenary of the abolition of slave trade. Those debates are much longer. Many more people participate in them. There are many more commemorative activities. So these are quite, it's a bit like comparing apples and oranges, but I nonetheless think that these should be compared because there are occasions on which British elites reckon with the legacies of colonialism. And it's very clear to me that while there is apology and contrition and shame when it comes to the homosexual legacies of colonialism, we see a much murkier moral conversation around slavery where British elites are more keen to commemorate abolition rather than the slave trade and also make a set of temporal arguments for why it is too difficult to say sorry for slavery. It's too far away, it's too far back in the past. We can't identify those who suffer than those who have beneficiaries. Actually we can and so on and so forth. So I kind of parse these temporal objections. I ask questions about whether it's really the money that's doing the work of generating these different attitudes towards different legacies of colonialism. And I conclude really with the suggestion that the inescapable I think conclusion for me is that race is doing quite a lot of work in that sexuality and these sexual legacies are read as things that also affect white people and white people with considerable political, social and economic capital. And the way I arrive at that conclusion is to also talk about some other kinds of apology that were going on around the same time, specifically around the figure of Alan Turing who was pardoned itself an odd word to use given that this was really the British state saying sorry for having convicted him for gross indecency in 1952. But this was another instance of apology which then generated what is called Turing's law under which I think several thousands of people who were convicted under this law can appeal for their sentences to be revoked, can appeal to have their part there and not for the exact legal term is here but to have their convictions lifted. So really this is a way of thinking about the work that race is doing in generating some kinds of apology for colonialism and not others. That's, I think that's so fascinating and I think you're right to kind of pause as you discuss this just to mark how extraordinary it is extraordinary both in the kind of asymmetry and the kind of inconsistencies as to which elements of empire get even acknowledged let alone apologized for but also in just the spectacle of it that actually having this kind of, you say, procession of people kind of doing an account and trying to atone not something that many folks really ever expected to see and I think does signal a kind of shift in like guys that many people are talking about and I think is manifest in a whole host of different activities. We do have a question which has come in via the Q and A from my fabulous colleague, Kieran Foll who says, thank you, this is fascinating. Thank you very much Kieran for saying so. She has a question because you mentioned the term grammar. How does language, for example, imperial languages or local languages figure into defining queerness or more broadly what happens to language? What does language do when bound up in these anti-homosexual, anti-homosexuality laws that you cover in the book? Sorry, I muted myself. That's a great question. Thanks, Kieran. I think the language question is really important as our issues of translation. Just terms like queer identity categories obviously have an Anglo-American provenance and have traveled and are used in different ways in different places. So one of the things that struck me quite early on doing this work is that Ugandan, I will say kuchus. This is the term that Ugandan, what we would, the non-normative gender and sexual community in Uganda use the term kuchu meaning sameness to identify themselves. So in one sense, the invention of new words has been one way to respond to the imperialism of language. What I found quite interesting is that not everybody in Uganda, in the non-normative gender and sexual community, see I'm hesitating to use words like LGBT and queer precisely because we're talking about language here, but not everybody in this community is comfortable with the term kuchu. And in fact, the term seemed to produce the same fault lines as the term queer, which is to say that some people didn't like it because it was too radical, it devoted a kind of in your face activism. This is really the finding of Stella Nyanzi who has done some of the most impressive ethnographic work on the queer community in Uganda. So if the term kuchu produces the same fault lines as the term queer, then I think there's no kind of foolproof placeholder for gender and sexual non-normativity, whatever language one works in. In other words, the problem isn't just linguistic, it's also conceptual and political. And so rather than looking for the perfect term, I felt like it was more important to think about the political work that these placeholders are doing. And so that ends up being what I focus on more than the actual terms and the battle, the inevitable battle over terms. Fantastic. I think I'm in complete agreement. Brilliant. We do have a second question. Unfortunately, I'm not sure who it's from because it just says anonymous attendee, but welcome anonymous attendee who says, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us. If I understood correctly, you talk about the way in which the 2014 Anti-Homosexuality Act was backed by Christian evangelicals that were not necessarily in Uganda. Do you think that social media and access to the internet may have helped connect Christian evangelicals to Ugandan elites and intensified this process of forming these global conservative alliances? More generally, do you think that online connectivity and access to the internet might help spread both fusing favor of and or against LGBTQ individuals in post-colonial states with anti-LGBP legislation? Definitely. I think, I mean, I haven't studied social media and media very carefully, although I used a lot of material from it. This is definitely a globalization story on both sides, which is to say that both conservatives and queer activists were globally linked and were often using global frames in which to advance their claims and to win the kind of discursive battle that they were fighting against each other. So it was not uncommon to hear Ugandan conservatives use a kind of family values discourse that sounded like it had been lifted straight out of, you know, a US Republican Christian rights playbook. And similarly, queer activists in Uganda also using global frames. And then your rights that media and online connectivity helped with this. Social media has become something of a battleground as it has in many places, but it's also a space in which the state engages in surveillance and tries to monitor and entrap. So it has a kind of mixed potential here. It's not a straightforwardly emancipatory and connective kind of medium. Sorry, I do look like I'm distracted, but I'm just moderating the questions in the chat that they're coming in. We do have some more questions. So we'll stick with a few of those, some of which are linking to this broader question of intersectionality, which I had a question about myself, but perhaps we can take our cue from our audience. So somebody else who is anonymous, so I can't main check, but they say that this is really interesting. I wondered what Dr. Rao's thoughts are on progressing from a more performative, perhaps homo-capitalistic approach to LGBT awareness and the acceptance of queer citizens more broadly to an actual attitudinal change in post-colonial African nations without encouraging homo-romanticism or Orientalism. That's a good question, but it's not really one that I've asked or answered in the book. I'm almost not sure it's my place to be talking about attitudinal change and how to bring it about. What I have found very interesting is the way in which having a conversation about queerness in a register other than human rights can be quite useful and has a kind of potential that a hectoring moralistic human rights discourse might not. And I try and pursue this line of thought with reference to the story of the king that I talked about at the start of the talk. Specifically, I become interested in the ways in which queer Christian Ugandans might themselves identify with various aspects of the story and read themselves into it. And the way in which that story provides a method for which Ugandan kuchus might write themselves into the story of the nation rather than being seen as outside of it. So I'm really interested in the stories that people are already telling themselves, the contradictions in those stories and the ways in which those gaps and contradictions can be used to kind of make more space for dissident and non-normative positions. But that's a way of saying or asking how can we use the extant moral architecture of a society to make more space within it rather than how can we inject new ideas or attitudinal change from the outside. And that's the direction in which I would take that interest, I think. I think that's fascinating. And it does touch on something I wanted to raise. I love the way that you use little kind of vignettes and little anecdotes in your book to kind of highlight some of these kind of affective experiential dimensions. One of which is a kind of, you shine a light on your own sense of positionality in this as a researcher working in a certain place of a certain kind of cultural background. I wonder if you could tell us that story about the encounter you had with the priest, I believe it was. And how that made you reflect on your own positionality as you researched these places that you're trying to engage with rather than kind of impose an idea from the outside. Yeah, so it was a really tiny moment, fleeting moment in my fieldwork which I didn't think of at the time but actually ended up having quite a, I think profound effect on how I thought about the book as a whole. I'd been meeting this particular Anglican priest on several occasions because I was studying the story of the king and the martyrs who, by the way, one element of the story that I haven't mentioned to viewers is that the people who were murdered by the king in 1884 or executed, I should say, were canonized by the Catholic church as the first converts to Christianity who'd laid down their lives for the religion. And so they are venerated as martyrs, they're Catholic saints and the anniversary of their execution is remembered every year on the 3rd of June as Uganda martyrs days. The whole cult of veneration and worship around these figures and there are churches and shrines and so forth. So a lot of my work for one section of the book was an ethnography of these sites of commemoration in which capacity I was meeting priests and pilgrims and theology students. So this one particular priest somebody had met several times on several trips and on one of those occasions said to me, you have to be careful with your things, your camera and your phone and your stuff because when people see a muzungu like you they might try and steal your stuff. Now the term muzungu is, it could be used for any foreigner but it's usually used for white people. So I was a bit taken aback by the fact that I had been racialized as a muzungu given that there was quite a large Indian population in Uganda who would be called Muyindi and that's how I was used to being racialized. It taught me a lot of things. It taught me that positionality is not just something you can declare and expect the world to run with. You are read in all kinds of ways that you have no control over and that shapes the kinds of interactions you have with people. It made me wonder why I was being read in that way and I had to conclude that despite being Indian citizen et cetera, grew up in India the fact that I worked in Britain, in a British university, the fact that I was asking questions about this thing called sexuality which I wasn't really asking about in that particular conversation but I think this person had an awareness that my interest in this story came via the fuss around the Anti-Homosexuality Act. So I was asking questions in the register to an epistemic frame that was being associated with the West and European-ness and whiteness and of course it didn't help being based at the School of Oriental and African Studies which has a century-long history of producing, well, it was created for a certain purpose and perhaps is still seen by some as continuous with that purpose. So all of these things made my position much more complicated than I had anticipated when I started doing the work. It made me think about my location in more pessimistic terms. Said has this wonderful meditation on diasporic actually in his case exile identity where he says it gives you this double perspective where you can see things both from the vantage point of the colonized and the colonizer and so forth and I began to think that actually it might give you the worst of both worlds where you both lose contact with the place you're from and acquire this imperial epistemic baggage through which you then begin to see other parts of the world. So I suppose the upshot of all this is to say that this set of thoughts made me think that I had to disavow any kind of moral high ground when I wrote this book. It meant that the voice and the register in which I wrote couldn't be moralistic and hectoring. It had to be a quieter voice in which I was mapping these uncomfortable discourses and disconnects and contradictions rather than purporting to offer answers from a kind of moral high ground even though moral issues are really central to the whole thing. I think it's so interesting and it shines a light on those very kind of complicated relationships between coloniality and race and ethnicity and interpolation and I really like your framing there of how we're just not in control of that. We're not in control, we don't get received in the ways that we would oftentimes most like and really there's nothing to be done about that. Actually, if one is to be lebanacian about it, one must just encounter the face and do so without kind of trying to influence how you're kind of judged or interpolated but it oftentimes makes for acute discomfort which I think your anecdote captures really well. Brilliant, we do have some more questions in the chat. Claire says that they love the book, so that's brilliant, thank you Claire. And asks, could you talk a bit more about your critique of intersectionality and how it's been misunderstood as a framework? How does this interact with post slash colonialism? I'm also going to add on to the question Mateus' question as well, one of our fabulous decolonising EDI ambassadors, I should say in the department. Mateus says, thanks for your work, it's so interesting. He has questions about the use of the tool of intersectionality. Could you elaborate on the contribution of this tool in your work? Could you also detail a bit more how people navigate between gender and class or casts in the countries that you explore? And would you say that the intersectionality tool, you can also use that in the places that you study? Yeah, thanks Claire and Mateus for those questions. So I don't think the book is critical of intersectionality, per se, I think it's critical of the way in which it's deployed, particularly liberal deployments of intersectionality, which presume that these different axes that we think about coming together to create a positionality can be separated somehow and spoken out in isolation from each other. That's the view of, that's the kind of liberal premise undergirding some deployments of intersectionality that I'm critical of. And to kind of, to offer that critique, I return to the foundational work on intersectionality by Kimberly Crenshaw and I try and reread her work to show how when she's talking about categories such as sex and race, these are not singular axes unmarked by other categories. So when she's looking at legal anti-discrimination doctrine in the US, she very profoundly I think observes that anti-sex discrimination doctrine is heavily influenced by the experiences of middle-class white women and anti-race discrimination doctrine is heavily influenced by the experiences of middle-class black men. So the axes of sex and race are not sex and race really, it's white woman and black man. In other words, these axes are already invisibly intersectional to use Anakar Stathis' formulation. So one thing I do I think is to reread intersectionality as more complex perhaps than the kind of simple traffic intersection image that we've reduced it to. But I then also turn to Ambedkar, the Dalit thinker and political leader I mentioned earlier, because he has a very interesting essay on caste and gender in which he essentially in his effort to arrive at a definition for caste says, caste is nothing but endogamy. It's inseparable from the regulation of gender and sexuality. And in sort of equating these two things, he neither he takes us away from a kind of base superstructure imagery that Marxist will be familiar with where some categories are foundational and others are derivative. And he also takes us away from the traffic intersection where the categories I imagined is quite separate from each other but come together briefly for a moment before they fly apart again. And instead he gives us something which I think looks more like a mobius strip where one surface seamlessly becomes the other. So one category becomes the other and you cannot quite tell the point at which that has happened. And I think many of the chapters in the book are tracing the ways in which sexuality becomes read as race or caste or class in these different institutional configurations that I'm moving between. I think the method is historical in part because I'm tracing the ways in which categories of governmentality get read as or through the lens of other categories and why they are intelligible in that way. To answer that question, you have to pay attention to the history of those institutions and how they were founded. So that's the kind of reading of intersectionality that I offer. It's a rereading rather than a critique of it. I think it's really fascinating. And I think you put it very well in the book where you talk about some of our contemporary kind of uses or misuses of intersectionality kind of separates out these various strata into kind of separable analytics and Crenshaw in the original framing, as you say, was actually talking about kind of overlaps and intersections in a much less divisible way. And it reminds me a bit of how you talk about time in the book. Obviously the book is about, you know, temporality and the hauntings, I suppose, to use a Deridian term of the past and the future in the present. And I wonder if we could draw a kind of parallel there that what we actually see when it comes to temporalities of queerness and coloniality is something similar that you actually have the kind of intersectionality of past and present and future in a way that it doesn't fit with the linear separations that we would conventionally perhaps kind of use as conceptual tools. Yeah. So I realized quite late in the course of writing the book that this was a book about time because all the chapters were either reaching back into the past or looking forward to the future. And that made it quite clear to me that this moment of the present that we're talking about is inflected both by the past and the future. So when I think about the past, I'm very much thinking with Derrida but also Avery Gordon, Saidiah Hartman. These are the figures I turn to to understand the haunting and the impressive of the past on the present. But I was also thinking about the ways in which anticipations of futurity mark the politics of the present. And here, Steven Frosch's reading of Freud's essay on the uncanny was particularly useful. There's a moment in this essay where Freud is sitting in a train and it kind of stops with a shutter and the door of the carriage flies open and there's a mirror on the door and he thinks this old guy walks into the carriage and he wants to say, sorry, you're in the wrong carriage but then suddenly realizes it's his own reflection he's looking at. And he doesn't recognize it and he doesn't like it because it's like an anticipation of the future that he doesn't want to see. And Frosch uses this to suggest that the present is also kind of cross-hatched by the future if you like. So I was trying to make visible the ways in which the past is in the present, the future is in the present and both of these presences are doing work, political work. They're both terrains for struggle for a queer politics, some of which is about memory and some of which is about futurity. And they're both these really ambivalent terrains. So we have all this work in queer theory that says, looking to the future inevitably leads in this liberal, teleological direction, we should look towards the past and we have other kinds of work that says, well, there are critical ways of looking at the future that don't last into a kind of liberal, teleological futurity. And I found this kind of work helpful because it helps us to think about the connection between time and psychic life and political transformation. But I also think there's a kind of manifesto-like quality to some of this work in the sense that it has a very clear sense of where we should look temporarily for emancipatory space and potential. And I'm more ambivalent about that. I think most of this work is looking at the mainstream kind of US LGBT movement and articulating its critiques in relation to that. So it becomes possible to advocate a kind of temporal reorientation in quite a singular way. But if we think about the global political presence as a heterotemporal thing in the way that Deepesh Chakraborty and other post-colonial theorists have taught us to, then I think it's much more difficult to write a kind of temporal manifesto. And that's why I think the book is more ambivalent about whether memory or futurity. They're both terrains for compromise as well as for radical unsettling. And I'm trying to illustrate that as the book goes along. And I think you do so extremely beautifully. And I think that that really does describe and capture kind of what one of the core things the book does. We will pop back to the questions now because several have come in. One person says they have to leave for a meeting just to express their thanks. They've very much enjoyed the talk. Another anonymous post says, thank you for presenting your fascinating research. My questions would be, firstly, do you see queerness as only, sorry, do you see queerness only as practised or also negatively and positively ascribed? Secondly, what does acknowledging homo-romanticism mean for queer POC activism practically? And also what does this complexity mean for allyship? There's a follow-up question from Gina, which is also about activism. So I might pose that as well if it's not too much so that we can respond to both. Gina says, thank you very much for this talk. It's very interesting. I've often read about the tension between queer theory and queer activism. The argument goes that queer theory is so much about the construction problematization and refusing fixed definitions that it needs to a political paralysis. Basically, political activism becomes impossible because of any generalization or clear definition of aims is refused. As Dr. Hearst mentioned, you're also an activist, so how do you resolve that tension personally? Yeah, great questions. First are the questions from Anonymous at 144. I see queerness as practised, but also as ascribed. Somebody may not identify as queer, but might be queered by somebody else, by the states reading of that person. So I think both of those things are going on. What does acknowledging homo-romanticism mean for queer POC activism practically? I think it requires us, because I identify with that term queer POC, it requires us to refuse the kind of self-orientalization that we sometimes engage in in order to disavow responsibility for the things that we disagree with. So I think part of what I would hope is that is that we can tell more complicated stories about responsibility. For example, when talking about homophobic laws, it is a very partial answer to point out that these laws are colonial legacies, because in many cases, post-colonial regimes have embraced and re-signified those laws and have kept them on the statute books for 50, 60, 70 years. So we've got to tell more complicated stories about both colonial and post-colonial responsibility, whether or not these formations are antithetical to each other or working in collaboration with each other. That's the kind of account that I'm trying to provide in the book. What does this complexity mean for allyship? I haven't actually thought much about allyship in the book. I tend to think more in terms of solidarity, which I think of as a relationship in which people enter into, because their own liberation is wrapped up in the relationship rather than allyship, which sometimes can take the form of, yeah, this is something I need to think about more, but I think I'm more comfortable with the language and politics of solidarity than allyship. I think because I'm suspicious of help that is given where there is nothing at stake for the people giving help. And I think with solidarity, the stakes are more visible. And yeah, coming to Gina's question, yes. Well, first I would say I'm not sure I've been much of an activist in recent years. I feel like the Academy has kind of sucked me in, but it's true that a lot of this work departs from conversations with activists and the preoccupations of activists. So in that sense, perhaps it's a kind of bridge between those walls. And it's also a book that doesn't distinguish very starkly between activist and academic sources in that many of the activists I was working with are also some of the first people writing about queerness and queer struggles in their particular contexts. So they also, they're writing as organic intellectuals, if you like, and many of the academic works that I'm engaging with have also a kind of activist performativity in the world. If we think about figures like Butler and Poirre and the way in which they've been taken up, I think they kind of blur these boundaries. So one place to look is, for an answer to your question, is the preface to the second edition of Gender Trouble, where Judith Butler says something very interesting. She says, they say, as a result of having been a board member of IGLHRC, which is one of the global LGBT organizations, now called Outright, I think. I have arrived at a more provisional view of the usefulness of universal categories. This is quite different from how the first edition of Gender Trouble reads, which offers a much more thoroughgoing critique of universal categories as always and inevitably exclusionary. And in the second preface, you get a more provisional take on universal categories. This takes us closer, I think, to Spivak's view of strategic essentialism. And I think that that gives us a way of mediating between the necessity of essentialism, but it needs to be a strategic essentialism that is kept alive only so long as it serves a visible political interest. And we need to be ready to dismantle those essentialisms when they uplift their usefulness. So it's a call for a more dynamic kind of essentialism, one that's willing to shift as conditions change. And that's how I try and mediate this tension that you described so well in your question. I think that's great. And for what it's worth, I completely agree. I've often invoke exactly that from Spivak. And I think the point, perhaps, is not so much to resolve the tension. You don't suddenly stick your fingers in and say, right, whatever categories we're using now, other ones will stick with forever. Neither you decide, right, I'm going to go and curl up under my duvet and let the chips fall where they may. It's that constant negotiation of provisionally coming together to work for a particular goal or to use a certain category in a strategically essentialist way, but then taking the time to deconstruct and to regroup and to reflect and to acknowledge and work to mitigate the unwitting reproductions and essentialisms that might come along with any such activity. So I'm afraid, as far as I've ever found, there's no resolution to that. But also, that's intuitive, right? You know, no activist or no doer in the world ever expects to have a kind of fully functional road map that's going to exist forever. It's always kind of assertion and work and then kind of deconstruction and reflection. And we can think of it dialectically, perhaps, as part of this Mobius trip that you introduced before. Definitely. I mean, it's never whether to do one or the other. It's when it's useful to do this and when it's useful to do that. And so, yeah, I agree. Yeah, I mean, I threw my chips in a few years ago and talked about how deconstruction itself can be a kind of resistance that actually it doesn't lead us to necessarily, at least to inertia or navel gazing or some abyss, but rather to a kind of constant reflexivity in vigilance which itself produces stuff, right? Which actually leads us to new questions and new allergics or solidarities or intersections. Good, we're running a little towards time. So I will invite the audience to start compiling the kind of last questions that we'll pose. Perhaps I'll pose one or two of my own just taking advantage of my position as chair. We've talked a lot about kind of a lot of the high theory things and we've talked about some of the other conceptual questions I wanted to get at. You talked about your own kind of identification before. So I'll ask you the question about kind of how you sort of see the relationship between the autobiographical dimensions of the book, particularly the kind of introductory sections where you tell quite a kind of detailed story about certain events and realizations in your own life. But how do you sort of negotiate the intersections of these for private sort of sides of yourself and the academic pursuits that you've been discussing? Yeah, I mean, that's quite hard because you always run the risk of lapsing into a kind of solipsistic navel gazing. But at the same time, I take seriously the feminist insight that the personal is political and the way in which feminist IR has also pushed us to think about how the personal is geopolitical and vice versa. So it felt inescapable to thread through the autobiographical with the work itself, especially if positionality is something that we have to constantly attend to and think about. Yeah, I don't know if I want to say too much about the autobiographical sections in part because I feel like it might be a bit of a plot spoiler. But- You have to read the book to find out. I guess I would just say, while I think the autobiographical is inescapable, I think I'm also wary of autobiography becoming elevated into another meta narrative to generalize from one's own experience and to write as if that is the experience of the world is the very problematic thing. And so I think we need to be careful about that and about making those kinds of assumptions. I think as hard as an academic writing is arguably kind of narrative or first person or autobiographical work is harder still because of the confessional aspect, how do you balance, how much of yourself you want to kind of give away in that how do you avoid the grander or more kind of dramatic or over-dramatic dimensions? For what it's worth, I think, I can't really find fault with anything about the book but I think you strike a really good balance there between being very kind of open and candid but without falling into the traps of anything kind of too over the top or whatever. So I think it's a great balance. Have you, I don't know if you've read this, the Rachel Kask trilogy. It's the kind of work that's been called, I guess it's called auto fiction now. And the first book in that trilogy is really interesting because the author is ostensibly talking about herself but you hear her voice very little. It's mostly other people talking and you have to kind of figure out who she is based on how all of these other people are talking to her and almost at her. There are moments where you want her to say more somehow but I found that very interesting. So I think people can write autobiographically without necessarily foregrounding the eye and a voice that runs throughout the whole thing. That's interesting. The other phenomenon that I've been interested in is auto ethnography and auto theory. So something like Maggie Nelson and the Argonauts is doing something like that I think it's a memoir that's written with a really strong engagement, both a strong and a light engagement with theory throughout the whole memoir where she's engaging with interrogating all of these classic works of queer theory and feminist theory as she's writing the story of the transformation of her body. She's having a child with a partner who is undergoing transition. And so it's about two bodies changing and it's a really wonderful... I mean, there are problems with the book but I think overall I think it's a very interesting exercise in writing about the self but also the world in a way that holds both imbalance. I think that's a lovely way to put it. Brilliant. We have a question from another anonymous participant who says, thank you for your talk. Very much looking forward to reading the book. What would you make... Sorry, would you make any connections between the transphobia that we see in the current UK government and the country's imperialist identity? I think you all need to update. That's a great question but it's not actually something I've thought about. Yeah, I'd want to think about that rather than just venture an answer off the cuff. I do think about Sandy Stone's famous post-transsexual manifesto where she draws some really interesting links between the ways in which trans bodies are policed by the medical establishment and the political establishment and imperialism. And she draws some really interesting and fascinating connections. In a sense, this is about patrolling boundaries of identity. So turf discourse is patrolling the boundaries of gender identity and acting as a kind of gatekeeper. And I think perhaps there are some really interesting parallels between that and the way in which political elites are patrolling the boundaries of British identity and the British state. And if we think about the whiteness of turfness, and again, I'm aware that there probably are POC turfs as well. But I think what I'm talking about here is a structure of whiteness that some POC elites have also entered into. There are some interesting resonances there but I see them both as boundary drawing and maintaining practices. And in that sense, I think there are probably some very close connections between the imperial nation state and the kind of turf discourse. Great, thank you very much. Brilliant. I'll make one final call for questions. And I will pose a last one of my own just in the interim to see if anybody else wants to have the last word. I mean, I'd just like to sort of wrap up and just ask kind of what's your hope for the book? How do you want it to land? What kinds of reactions would you be most pleased by? And of course, the big question, what next? Where from? Yeah. Gosh, that's probably a question I should have asked myself more. But I think I wanted this book to make sense in Uganda, India, and the UK. I want people in these... The book is very situated in these places even though part of it is written at an abstract theoretical register. I'm also trying to situate it in those places. And I was conscious of audiences in these three places and I wanted to speak to them. And I hoped also that we might make some connections between those places. Especially because the book is about the afterlives of imperialism in part. I hope this gives us a gendered and a sexual way of thinking about those afterlives. That's very much a preoccupation of the work I'm doing now. You may know that I've been somewhat obsessed with the politics of statues for the last few years. This began with a series of kind of unplanned blogs on the disorder of things, which sort of took on a life of their own and I think are going to be the basis of the project I'm working on at the moment. It feels like the right time to be doing that gave in the summer of last year and the spate of both statue and renaming controversies that have entered or that seem to fuel the culture wars of our time. I'm interested in what underpins this phenomenon and these discourses and how the world is changing as a result of them. Brilliant stuff. I've just popped a link to one of those pieces into the chat. If those who don't yet know the disorder of things, it's a really fabulous kind of critical IR blog put together by students at the LSE and colleagues in other universities around London but also further afield and it really does shine a light on what often times later become kind of formal academic publications. It often times shines a light on these ideas and development and I think your commentary there on statues I would be thrilled to see that kind of expanded out into what comes next. Marvelous. Well, I don't know that we've got any further questions so it just remains for me to thank you most sincerely for coming to join us today. What a brilliant conversation if I say so myself. I've learned a lot. I really enjoyed reading the book and I heartily recommend it to everybody on the call and everybody watching on YouTube in the recording subsequently. Thank you for coming. Come and see us again soon, I hope. Yeah, thanks, Ivy, for having this organizing and for such a brilliant stimulating conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. I appreciate that and happy LGBTQ.