Introduction

How can we think about queer longings to belong without disregarding the complicity of queerness in racial, militarist, and colonial formations? What are the ways to approach queer displacements critically yet responsibly? What is the queer currency of ‘diaspora’ in a world where only some queer lives matter while others are destined for erasure, oblivion, and death? This talk is a meditation on the political, geographic, and conceptual terrains where ‘queer’ meets ‘diaspora’ – a meditation which draws, in part, on my own work on post-Soviet queer migranthood in Israel/Palestine, on queer necropolitics (with Jin Haritaworn and Silvia Posocco), and includes a virtual journey into the last two decades of critical queer scholarship.

Adi Kuntsman is lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Kuntsman published extensively on queer migration, politics and digital cultures. Kuntsman’s recent books include Figurations of Violence and Belonging: Queerness, Migranthood and Nationalism in Cyberspace and Beyond; Queer Necropolitics (co-edited with Jin Haritaworn and Silvia Posocco); and Digital Militarism: Israeli Occupation in the Social Media Age (co-authored with Rebecca Stein). For more information please visit the website.