Un/Worlding Solidarity: On Queer Tourism as Biopolitical Means to Elliptical Ends

Keywords: Social movements, Tourism, Queer, Biopolitics, Mobilities, Worlding
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Solidarity is often imagined as a future-oriented project of collectively making worlds otherwise. Yet contemporary practices of coalition-building rely upon spatially dispersed publics for whom the stakes of resistance are as varied as the geographies from which they agitate. In our hyperconnected world of stratified mobilities, presence is a political act. This paper asks what tourism can reveal about the instability of identity and attachments to place. Through the concept of “un/worlding”––a reworking of Jose Esteban Muñoz (2009) and Martin Manalansan’s (2015) formulations of queer worldings–– I explore how queer tourism operates as a biopolitical practice that facilitates elliptical solidarities. Such transient, place-disruptive encounters reveal the instability of belonging and the blurring of conventional biopolitical boundaries under capitalism’s commodification of bodies and identities. And, I argue, it is the messiness of belonging’s entanglement with violence and consumption (Valencia, 2010) that can make possible the renegotiation of entrenched, seemingly uncontestable, multi-scalar power dynamics that direct (im)mobilities.