Towards Decolonial Choreographies of Co-Resistance

Abstract

This article engages movement as a methodology for understanding the creative coalition work that we carried out for a project series called Into the Light (ITL) that used research from university archives to mount a museum exhibition and then develop an interactive public education site that counters histories and ongoing realities of colonial eugenics and their exclusionary ideas of what it means to be human in Canada’s educational institutions. We address different movement practices, both those initiated by ableist-colonial forces to destroy difference and by our coalition of co-resistors to affirm difference. We apply a decolonizing and Anishinaabe philosophical lens alongside a feminist disability-informed neomaterialist and dance studies one to theorize examples of ITL’s “choreographies of co-resistance”. Anishinaabe knowledge practices refuse and thus interfere with colonial-eugenic practices of erasure while enacting an ethic of self-determination and mutual respect for difference. The ripple effect of this decolonizing and difference-affirming interference reverberates through our words and moves at varying tempos through our bodies—traveling through flesh, holding up at bones, and passing through watery, stretchy connective tissue pathways. These are our choreographies of co-resistance as actions of mattering and world-building.

Looking back and looking forward: Men and masculinity in psychological research on violence against women.

“…Decolonial and subaltern perspectives recognize culture as a critical site for contestation and thus interrogation, particularly in the wake of the west's colonialism of much of the world's land masses and peoples which, through the imposition of euro-western worldviews, values, and lifeways has resulted in the attempted cultural genocide (via the suppression of Indigenous languages, governance structures, gender orders, etc.) of Indigenous populations globally (Kelly et al, 2021(Kelly et al, , 2023. For this reason, feminist decolonial approaches emphasize the ethicalpolitical significance of reviving (where possible) precontact Indigenous worldsenses, cultural values, and political practices including those related to gender and sexuality, and of the equally critical need to apply a social justice optic to resuscitating and endorsing only those that create conditions for (sex, gender, human, and more-than-human) difference to thrive (Simpson, 2017).…”

“…First, our review focuses on cisgender men since the literature we examine mostly addresses cismen’s engagement in violence and generally fails to nuance gender (e.g., queer men, trans men). Second, we use gender categories (“men” and “women”) reluctantly and provisionally, being mindful of how categories and binaries reproduce social differences and hierarchies (Butler, 1990, 1993; Rice, 2014) and how they privilege western 2 ways of knowing that seek to understand the “essence” of things over decolonial ones that aim to understand their relationalities (Kelly et al, 2023; Lugones, 2010, 2012). Drawing on critical theory, we orient to “men” and “masculinity” as “concepts-on-the-move” (A.…”

“…By translating the men's descriptions and explanations into the language of the colonizer (english) and by analyzing the words translated using western colonial conceptualizations of gender (as binary, as a system regulating gender, sex, and sexuality, and as a necessary or foundational component of human subjective and social life), these researchers inadvertently imposed what we understand as a colonial gender system unto gender/sexual relations among formerly colonized peoples. This move is problematic insofar as it reproduces colonialism's gendered relations of ruling (i.e., heteronormativity, patriarchy) and forecloses possibilities for unearthing/recuperating other systems for organizing human intimate relations that predate or exist outside the colonial gender system (Dery, 2021;Kelly et al, 2023;Lugones, 2010Lugones, , 2012. Such homogenization results in reductive, traditionalist analyses of masculinity and culture that elude or erase how culture itself comprises a critically important site of contestation and how its study offers pathways into surfacing/analyzing the power struggles occurring from within over who gets to define "culture" (Narayan, 2000).…”