C. Heike Schotten
C. Heike Schotten is Professor of Political Science and affiliated faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research interests lie at the various intersections of queer theory, Nietzsche studies, biopolitics, the War on Terror, and liberatory critical theory. Drawing on each of these areas, her research theorizes the various meaning of and possibilities for liberation within the specific contexts of U.S. imperialism, U.S. settler colonialism, and historically still-hegemonic Euro-American constructs of knowledge and knowing.
Her first book, Nietzsche’s Revolution: Décadence, Politics, and Sexuality (Palgrave, 2009), argued for a re-reading of Nietzsche as the unlikely intellectual forebear of queer theory and, as such, an unwittingly revolutionary figure in his affirmation of the decay of traditionally raced and gendered bodies in 19th c. Europe.
Her second book, Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/queer-terror/9780231187473), uses queer theory to offer a reading of U.S. settler colonialism as, on the one hand, a specifically futurist formation of desire and subject formation and, on the other, the precursor and necessary ground of U.S. imperialism’s current chapter, the War on Terror. The unexamined hypermoralism of life and death that animates the “with us or against us” absolutism of “terrorism” discourse is a deliberately reactionary attempt to disqualify decolonization as nihilism and evil, a moralizing that can and must be read as a direct outcome of the United States’ unresolved status as an only “incompletely” “successful” settler project. Queer theory, then – as both a political project and a counterformation of desire – provides an unexpected if essential resource for liberatory resistance to U.S. imperial and settler formations.
Her current work expands in these directions, making explicit the radical/Left politics promised by queer theory’s 1990s origins and providing readings and applications of this radicalism to decolonization, on the one hand, and political opposition to morality and moralisms of all sorts, on the other.
Her first book, Nietzsche’s Revolution: Décadence, Politics, and Sexuality (Palgrave, 2009), argued for a re-reading of Nietzsche as the unlikely intellectual forebear of queer theory and, as such, an unwittingly revolutionary figure in his affirmation of the decay of traditionally raced and gendered bodies in 19th c. Europe.
Her second book, Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/queer-terror/9780231187473), uses queer theory to offer a reading of U.S. settler colonialism as, on the one hand, a specifically futurist formation of desire and subject formation and, on the other, the precursor and necessary ground of U.S. imperialism’s current chapter, the War on Terror. The unexamined hypermoralism of life and death that animates the “with us or against us” absolutism of “terrorism” discourse is a deliberately reactionary attempt to disqualify decolonization as nihilism and evil, a moralizing that can and must be read as a direct outcome of the United States’ unresolved status as an only “incompletely” “successful” settler project. Queer theory, then – as both a political project and a counterformation of desire – provides an unexpected if essential resource for liberatory resistance to U.S. imperial and settler formations.
Her current work expands in these directions, making explicit the radical/Left politics promised by queer theory’s 1990s origins and providing readings and applications of this radicalism to decolonization, on the one hand, and political opposition to morality and moralisms of all sorts, on the other.
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Books by C. Heike Schotten
Roundtables/Critical Exchanges by C. Heike Schotten
Peer-Reviewed Articles by C. Heike Schotten
evaluating activist strategies, practices and discourses of political resistance.
Disentangling Nietzsche’s parallel discourses of strength, superiority, and spirituality in the first essay of On the
Genealogy of Morals, I argue that master and slave morality are better understood as ethical practices of the self than
as surrogates for either a binary classification of strength and weakness or a political demarcation of oppressor and oppressed. In doing so, I offer an application of this analysis to the horrific violence visited upon Gaza by Israel in its 2008-09 military assault.
María Lugones can, taken together, offer a rich and innovative approach to understanding and realizing the possibility of revolution. From radically opposed perspectives, both Nietzsche and Anzaldúa articulate the necessity of accepting contradiction and multiplicity as the conditions of political transformation, and offer a new conception of revolution that displaces mere reversal as its dominant meaning. Lugones supplies important tactical strategies for realizing this revolution in her suggestions of playful “world”-travel. Taken together, these three thinkers challenge radical critics to re-think not only the revolutionary project itself, but also their own position with regard to that project, and to the dominant order they seek to overturn.
Book Chapters by C. Heike Schotten
evaluating activist strategies, practices and discourses of political resistance.
Disentangling Nietzsche’s parallel discourses of strength, superiority, and spirituality in the first essay of On the
Genealogy of Morals, I argue that master and slave morality are better understood as ethical practices of the self than
as surrogates for either a binary classification of strength and weakness or a political demarcation of oppressor and oppressed. In doing so, I offer an application of this analysis to the horrific violence visited upon Gaza by Israel in its 2008-09 military assault.
María Lugones can, taken together, offer a rich and innovative approach to understanding and realizing the possibility of revolution. From radically opposed perspectives, both Nietzsche and Anzaldúa articulate the necessity of accepting contradiction and multiplicity as the conditions of political transformation, and offer a new conception of revolution that displaces mere reversal as its dominant meaning. Lugones supplies important tactical strategies for realizing this revolution in her suggestions of playful “world”-travel. Taken together, these three thinkers challenge radical critics to re-think not only the revolutionary project itself, but also their own position with regard to that project, and to the dominant order they seek to overturn.
Presented as part of the Sawyer Seminar at Penn State University: Birthing the Nation: Gender Sex and Reproduction in Ethnonationalist Imaginaries.
Interview by Rima Najjar.
At the 2019 American Political Science Association (APSA) conference, the Foundations of Political Theory section held a members’ meeting to discuss a proposed resolution to endorse the academic boycott of Israel. This is our account of the meeting, its origins, and its immediate aftermath. We offer it in the hope of furthering the conversation among those who were unable to attend, and to combat false claims that some of the resolution’s opponents spread online.
A dispatch/report in the wake of the American Studies Association's historic vote to uphold the academic boycott of Israel.
A critique of Jewish-identified Palestine solidarity work in the U.S.
A critical response to Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi's "Pinkwatching and Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and Its Discontents"
A critique of disaggregating Palestinian deaths by gender.