Situated Planetarities

I proposed situated planetarities as a decolonial, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racism, feminist, and queer approach to: the analysis of multiple relations of power and how they operate together inseparably, the most subalternized subjects, and modalities of resistance and transformation, from inside small-scale contexts and yet with concerns for the freedom life of the entire planet in mind (Bacchetta 2020; Forthcoming 2025). The notion of situated in situated planetarities refers to the localized context, while planetarity invokes the expansive scale of the entire earth, including all beings-becomings and their inter-relations.

Situated planetarities is a way to consider what and how power is operative in a given context with equal awareness about broader transnational relations of power inside and in relation to it. For example, during the 2023-2024 genocide in Gaza, the main actor deploying deadly violence is the colonial-occupying Israeli state and its military apparatus. This is the local context. However, the colonial-occupying Israeli state is financed by the United States and supported by all other states either through silence or through critique that is articulated yet not backed up with significant action. The entire world is highly informed about the genocide, the daily large-scale assassination of civilians, including women, children, the elderly, men, and even if not specifically articulated at this time, queers. The genocide has been condemned by United Nations resolutions, various states, non-governmental organizations, intellectuals, activists, and artivists. However, because of how transnational power has accumulated to bolster the colonial-occupying state of Israel, the genocide continues.

Let us now turn to an example of the operabilities of power. We might begin with Israel’s genocidal tactics which include indiscriminate massacre, massive mutilations through bombings causing loss of limbs, the elimination of Palestinian history by destroying records of families, births, deaths, property deeds, university degrees, etc., and blocking Palestine’s future by obliterating homes, universities, hospitals, everything. Situated planetarities can render visible links across other localized situations of colonial occupation, apartheid, genocide. For instance, in Kashmir which is militarily occupied by India. elimination tactics include the massive disabling of Kashmiris through blinding. Farther back, colonial slaughter in the Congo, organized under Belgium’s Leopold II, similarly included the mass mutilation of Congolese subjects: chopping limbs, blinding. The planetary aspect in all these situations consists of colonial-racist complicity among variably positioned colonizers who come to each other’s aid when needed (i.e. the U.S. financing genocide in Palestine), or who refuse to condemn atrocities, or who help each other to deny them.

Situated planetarities comes directly out of my academic and activist work in multiple sites – India, Brazil, Morocco, Cameroon, France, U.S., Italy – on lesbian, QTPOC, and decolonial queer movements on the one hand, and on gender and sexuality in right-wing movements on the other. Across these contexts I could not help but notice distinct kinds of relations of power, differences in how they operate together, dissimilar subalternized subjects, and variable modalities of resistance and transformation. Situated planetarities directly resists colonial-racialized reduction to the same, homogenization, essentialization, and universalization, all mechanisms of power that work to erase or marginalize whatever does not fit the dominant standard. Situated planetarities is a way to open a space to understand different kinds of conditions, situations, subjects, and practices. For instance, seen from afar, India is often homogenized. Yet in India colonialism, coloniality, caste, class, and religious relations of power have produced a multiplicity of distinct, variably positioned, subalternized, and dominant subjects. The subalternized subjects include Dalits, Adivasi, Muslims, and unruly queers, lesbians, transgender people, and more. The dominant subjects encompass heteronormative, homonormative, and most recently transnormative, upper caste Hindus and all class-privileged elites. With situated planetarities we open a space to deeply historicize and contextualize, while considering both the specifics of location and the place of transnational flows and blockages of power in the co-formations and co-productions of relations of power (for more on co-formations and co-productions see Bacchetta Forthcoming 2025). In France the country’s many distinct assemblages of colonialisms and colonialities, race, class, gender, and sexuality operate to differentially construct and target an array of distinct categories of subalternized racialized subjects: Arabs, Blacks, Asians, racially mixed subjects, etc. Each of these is then internally differentiated. For example, for historical reasons, Algerians – who overturned France’s settler colonial project, and fought and won a war of independence – continue to be demonized in ways that Egyptians are not.

Situated planetarities was additionally incited by my concern with the bulldozing effect of what I call colonialism-and-race-amnesiac feminist and queer theories from the U.S., that is, theorizations that do not make colonialism or racism central to their analyses of gender and sexuality. Colonialism-and-race-amnesiac feminist and queer theories from the U.S. monopolize scholarly and sometimes also activist production locally in the U.S. but also travel and get mobilized transnationally. Here we have an epistemic problem created by power. In the context of their creation such theories do not integrate colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, racism, or class in their theorizations of gender and sexuality, and sometimes do not bother to even list them. Furthermore, they ignore and sometimes actually erase the subalternized feminist and queer theorizations that do make those relations of power central. They do not address, and sometimes eliminate, the gendered and sexed subjects who are most subalternized by and in colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, racism, class. By action or by default colonialism-and-race-amnesiac feminist and queer theories position themselves as the only feminist and queer theory in existence. The irony is that historically in the U.S. subalternized queer theorizations actually precede the colonialism-and-race-amnesiac ones (Bacchetta et al. 2011). Some examples are the theoretical poetry of the Native lesbian poet Chrystos, the writings of the Black lesbian Combahee River Collective, or the decolonial polylingual, polyvocal work of the queer Chicanx Gloria Anzaldúa who was the first to bring the term queer into the academic context.

The problem that colonialism-and-race-amnesiac theories pose is epistemic because these theories are not neutral but rather saturated in and reproductive of dominant, particular-universalized, presuppositions, categories, logics, and conclusions. Their massive erasures of power and subjects make them already harmful in the site of their production (the U.S.). Their harm then is multiplied in the places of their arrival, imposition and reception. The “application” of colonialism-and-race-amnesiac theories to any and all empirical situations seriously skews the perception and analysis of small scale contextual and transnational relations of power and of subalternized subjects, thereby disrupting possibilities for effective resistance and transformation. Importantly, which feminist and queer theories can and do travel is not a neutral phenomenon but instead is an effect of local (here U.S.) to planetary scale relations of power.

Situated planetarities is also a way to incite translocal and transnational solidarities that are based not necessarily on sameness – for power may operate quite differently from one place to another – but rather on what elsewhere I call common freedom-exigencies (Bacchetta Forthcoming 2025). A situated planetarities approach means that we do the work to understand exactly how power operates in each site, with full consideration of all relations of power, conditions, and subjects.