On Community and Belonging in the Corporate University- A Queer Loving Critique


Qingyan Sun, University of Alberta

In this paper, I explore the conditions of possibility for fostering transformative conceptions of community and belonging within the corporate university that is supported by the twinned forces of neoliberalism and white heteropatriarchy. Adopting an autoethnographic approach, I critically examine my experience of participating in a mentoring collective for racialized graduate students. I have been an active member of the collective since its inception, where Indigenous, Black and other racialized graduate students and the organizing faculty members routinely gather to commiserate and celebrate one another and circulate strategies of survival. Specifically, I interrogate a statement I made during one of the collective’s sessions that, as a gay man of East-Asian descent, I did not feel belonged at the gatherings. Leveraging feminist philosopher Judith Butler’s (2001) discussion of critique as a reflexive practice via which the terms of critique themselves are opened up for new possibilities of transformation, I contend that my words ideologically traded with a liberal-humanist model of belonging only available to some. By exposing that the binary feeling of either belonging or not belonging is produced by the colonial-capitalist structure to which the neoliberal university is also tethered, I first explore the possibility of a performative (Butler, 1998), praxis-oriented, and willful act “to belong” (Ahmed, 2006). I outline that, as the ontological premise and foundation of a community that centres overlapping situatedness, “to belong” gestures to Muñoz’s (1999) concept of disidentification via which we collectively seek to embody and live the relationships necessary to instill decolonial futurity. Thence, I suggest that we must resist the politically-vacated neoliberal model of community rampant in academic, administrative, and popular parlance which feigns evanescent amicability where it does not exist. Drawing on queer Asian studies (Eng, 2001), Indigenous queer studies (Belcourt, 2016), and intersectional feminism (Collins, 2019), I suggest that a radical community which fosters such resistance must remain willful, reflexive, flexible, and thus vigilant about shifting terrains of political alliance and opposition (Collins and Bilge, 2020; Young, 1994). What anchors this community is the shared positionality in and political will to dismantle infrastructures of white (hetero) patriarchal colonial capitalism, against the affective allure of emerging individually as fully legible subjects within the oppressive structures that attenuate our always already partial legibilities. Finally, I underscore that to construe community in this way also inevitably requires critical tensions to be held between our agency as (queer) racialized researchers and our complicities in Canada’s settler colonialism and its attendant gender and sexual norms.

This paper will be presented at the following session: