Panel 151: Intimate Engagements: Decolonizing Kinship, Gender, Sexuality

Within recent critical post-colonial scholarship the influence of colonial/European morals, ways of life and lines of thinking on perceptions and governance of, for example, sexualities has been made both clear and porous - the influence is undeniable but hardly straightforward or deterministic. In this context the colonial discourse is particularly relevant in the fields of kinship, sexuality and gender, with the added complication that in the meanwhile colonial/European ways of life and lines of understanding have been appropriated, adapted and put to use locally. The task of disentangling past and present (neo)colonial thinking around gender relations, kinship, intimacy and sexuality will be the main focus of the panel.
The panel seeks to understand what goes on regarding kinship, gender and sexuality around the world (with a focus on Africa), also in order to criticize and expand European/Western understandings. Besides conceptual work the panel wishes to discuss contemporary empirical examples of how (neo)colonial ideas of gender relations and intimacy have influenced local policies and social practices, detecting also patterns of resistance and failures in attempts to governance and influence. Issues of special urgency today are LGBT struggles, policies against violence against women and interpretations of African kinship in EU family reunification policies, to mention a few.