Critical Relationality: Queer, Indigenous, and Multispecies Belonging Beyond Settler Sex & Nature

Abstract

T his special issue of Imaginations was conceived to document, provoke, theorize, and imagine relations between humans, and between humans and other-than-humans, that go beyond and trouble normative categories of nature, sex, and love. Such categories manifest, for example, in settler-colonial forms of kin, kind, and relating that are hierarchical, anthropocentric, capitalocentric, and hetero-and homonormative. Activists, artists, and scholars have rigorously critiqued family forms legitimated by state-sanctioned marriage and naturalized by neo-Darwinian narratives of belonging centered around biological reproduction and which treat land, women, and children as property, yet such forms remain as relational ideals. The so-called natural is always paramount in settler ideas of appropriate ways to relate, control, and allocate rights and resources that reproduce structural inequities.