In the Everyday–Emerging Thoughts on Care and Non-Hiearchization as the Ontological Foundation of Solidarities in the Corporate University


Qingyan Sun, University of Alberta

To explore decolonial practices, Hunt & Holmes (2015) describe the important and necessary conversations with family and friends in everyday settings. Following this line of thought, this paper argues that one conception of solidarity can emerge from the everyday, where collective practices of care performatively constitute the political foundations for larger solidarity movements that aim to undermine and dismantle the infrastructures of structural dominations (Butler, 2015). To substantiate this argument, I begin by situating myself as a gay man of East-Asian descent within the academia dominated by whiteness and white men, specifically in its more immediate physical context of the corporate university. I employ an autoethnographic approach to dissecting the commonplace yet normalized practices of trivialization that I experience, which speak to the marginal statuses of certain areas of study within the institution. I then highlight that this marginalization within the institution is intersectional and that it corresponds to and trades with our experiences beyond its walls as we go about our daily lives as marked subjects within the colonial state of Canada. In this way, I demonstrate that the division between personal life and work life is artificial and unable to be sustained; as subjects navigating on the margins, more importantly, we cannot afford to sustain such manufactured division that hinders our political alliance and mobilization. Thence, I explore points of departure for conceptualizing solidarity that may have a radical potential for transformation. This will be achieved through the notion of non-hierarchization based on which a different kind of care and willful coming-together can be imagined which extends beyond the terms of the (neo)liberal state. Ultimately, drawing upon intersectional feminism (Collins, 2019), feminist philosophy (Ahmed, 2006; Butler, 2001), queer Indigenous studies (Belcourt, 2016), and queer of colour critique (Muñoz, 1999), I wish to underscore the political urgency of thinking about a queer feminist solidarity in the everyday, in what appears to be mundane, obscure, and insignificant.

This paper will be presented at the following session: