How can attention to affect help us understand the enduring attachment to identity within radical politics? This paper compares past and present mobilisations of diasporic and queer of colour identity to explore this provocation. To develop this analysis, I pay attention to the affective resonances in two textual encounters with/around the category of ‘queer Muslim’: the first, ethnographic; the second, archival. I use the first encounter to critique what I call "the enduring hold of identiarian attachment.” Rather than regurgitate a fatalism towards queer politics, I instead locate the ascendancy of queer liberalism and its associated affects within the deliberate erosion of radical identity politics as a result of austerity and neoliberalism. The second encounter considers the untethering of queer of color and diasporic politics from the possessive modality of the sexual rights bearing subject by critically analysing my own attachment to a passing instance of gay and anti-racist solidarity in the queer archive. Forgoing an excavationist project that searches for echoes of queer Muslim identity politics, I instead propose that the archive of queer and anti-racist mobilisations be read in ways that can attend to the materialist demands of anti-racist, feminist and queer affects.
Dr. Abeera Khan is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in at the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS. Her work provides critical interventions in queer of color critique, particularly regarding the category of “queer Muslim.” She has published in Feminist Review, Feminist Formations, lambda Nordica, and Religion and Gender.