Queer Pluriversality and World-Making in/through Heteronormative Times
Convener: Febi Rizky Ramadhan
Anthropological engagements with pluriversality and ontology have urged scholars to take seriously the coexistence of multiple worlds rather than assuming a single shared reality (Escobar 2020; Blaser and de la Cadena 2018). Within queer anthropology, scholars have likewise engaged the question of (queer) pluriversality, understanding queerness as grounded in multiple localities rather than anchored in a singular reality (e.g., the West) (see Eriksen and Jacobsen 2019; Hendriks 2018; Graham 2016). To some extent, this analytical move (i.e., approaching queerness through multiplicity) builds on earlier scholarship in queer anthropology that emphasizes the transnational, global, and multiscalar contexts of human sexualities, rather than treating sexuality through atomized or compartmentalized lenses (Loos 2009; Boellstorff 2006; Blackwood 2005; Grewal and Kaplan 2001; Puar 2001). Nevertheless, while anthropological scholarship has increasingly emphasized multiplicity, contemporary political and sociocultural conditions demonstrate parallel and coordinated efforts to foreclose such plurality. Across many contexts, heteropatriarchy is actively consolidated through a wide array of apparatuses, ranging from legal regimes and moral discourses to religious knowledge and scientific conventions (see Butler 2025; Graff and Korolczuk 2022; Kuhar and Paternotte 2017). These processes work to stabilize heteronormativity—and its corollaries of homophobia and transphobia—as the only legitimate way of inhabiting the world. In this sense, heteropatriarchy becomes an ontological project that seeks to produce and naturalize itself as a single shared reality.
This panel attends to this twofold tension. On the one hand, it foregrounds anthropological discussions of queerness that decenter and decanonize Western genealogies of queer theory. By engaging scholarship on pluriversality and its theoretical interlocutors (e.g., decolonial feminism and queer-of-color critique), the panel explores how modern categories of gender and sexuality emerged through colonial processes that organized humanity, knowledge, and social existence (Rao 2020; Lugones 2007). Rather than positioning queerness as a Western epistemic export or solely as a rights-based discourse, the panel foregrounds queer practices as sites of ontological negotiation and decolonial knowledge production. Approaching queerness as an ontological difference allows attention to queerness as a mode of existence that reconfigures relations among bodies, kinship, temporality, spirituality, and political belonging, thereby generating pluriversal futures within everyday life.
On the other hand, this panel seeks to complicate and critically examine contemporary projects that attempt to render the world in the singular image of heteronormativity. While anthropological accounts demonstrate the persistence of multiple worlds, anthropologists must also grapple with the political labor involved in suppressing ontological difference (see also Bangstad 2021; Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco 2021; Pasieka 2017; Murray 2009). The making of a singular reality is therefore neither given nor inevitable but continuously constructed, contested, and enforced. Bringing queer anthropology into dialogue with these processes allows us to examine not only how queer worlds exist, but also how they are rendered unintelligible, impossible, or unreal within projects that seek to monopolize reality itself.