Co-Motion: Re-Thinking Power, Subjects, and Feminist and Queer Alliances

In Co-Motion, theorist Paola Bacchetta proposes a new lexicon for analyzing power, subjects and alliances. Employing what she calls ’theory-assemblages’ to describe how diverse theoretical and political approaches inspire movements and produce different kinds of alliances, Bacchetta engages the inseparability of power relations-such as colonialism, capitalism, racism, caste, misogyny, and speciesism-and how their combinations, operability, and the analyses they require, shift in different contexts and lives of subjects. Focusing on France, India, Italy, and the US from the 1970s to the present, Co-Motion addresses a wide activist, artivist, and social movement archive- group statements, banners, pamphlets, graffiti, posters, poetry, sit-ins, films, art exhibits-to think and feel with the many ways that people, historically and today, come together to act. Through her expansive engagement with varied bodies of scholarship, sites of analysis, and kinds of reading, Bacchetta offers new approaches to analyze, confront, and transforming power, and to enact freedom.

Paola Bacchetta is Professor and Chair in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at University of California, Berkeley. She is author or co-editor of multiple books, including Gender in the Hindu Nation and Fatima Mernissi For Our Times, Global Raciality, Right-Wing Women.