By Paola Bacchetta
I felt incited to write what is now the book Co-Motion: Rethinking Power, Subjects and Feminist and Queer Alliances (Duke University Press, 2026) as I increasingly observed that both within our universities and as activists in the streets we currently work with concepts and approaches that have limitations for our present period. It seemed to me that especially in this historical moment of increasingly accelerated brutal right-wing and fascist expansion, of genocide and unprovoked war and murderous aggression, we urgently need new ways of understanding our present conditions and of envisioning other ways of living together on our planet. This book is a call for a collective epistemic revolution. I understand theory and concepts as poetry that provokes us, incites us, moves us, and makes us think, feel, and act in new ways.
As a contribution to moving towards collectively effecting a radical shift in everything, Co-Motion proposes that we reimagine how we are thinking about power; how relations of power (gender, sexuality, colonialism, capitalism, racism, class, disability, speciism) operate; how subjects are made and enact in the world; how relations of power at many scales intervene in our many different forms of alliances, solidarities, and other ways of coming together (or what I call co-motion); how to overcome the challenges; and how to create co-motion that can open up new possibilities for freedom-exigent collective life.
Throughout the book’s five chapters, I offer concepts and approaches to this end. Situated within transnational and global sociology, the book’s focus is primarily on four countries: the United States, France, India, and Italy. These are all places where I have lived, studied, and/or taught, and have been active in groups and social movements, and (in one case) in creative movements. Across the four sites, I engage intensely with: critical sociologies (especially epistemic critiques and contributions from India); feminist, gender, and queer-of-color thought in the United States and Europe; postcolonial and decolonial theory; global southern critical theory; francophone critical theory including Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and Mbembe; cultural studies; subaltern studies; Marxisms including Gramsci, Latour, McClintock, Hardt and Negri. I bring untranslated theorizations into English for the first time. With equal intensity, across the book’s pages, I explore what we can learn from activisms and artivisms in each context, a reflection that culminates in the last chapter (see below).
Ultimately, Co-Motion proposes an array of new concepts and methods. To think about power, it suggests co-formations to re-imagine gender, race, class, and disability together at a relatively smaller scale, such as in a neighborhood, or even a region of a country. It offers co-productions to consider relatively larger scale relations of power — such as colonialisms, racial capitalism, misogynarchies, or speciisms — that each have distinct manifestations in local scales. I think of misogynarchies as an umbrella concept that helps us to recognize that gender, sexuality, sexism, and queerphobias are site specific and are organized differently across the planet. For example, in India right-wing Hindu nationalists refer to themselves as “sons of the Motherland,” thus as a filiarchy (rule of the sons). The social and political organization of democratic countries in the global north, from ancient Greece to the US Senate, can be described more as modeled on fraternarchy (rule of the brothers) than as a patriarchy (rule of the father or king). In some societies there are complex combinations such as matriliny, matrifocality, and husband or father rule at once. In sum, misogynarchies is a broad category that makes space for many kinds of localized assemblages of gender and sexuality relations of power. Misogynarchies helps us avoid reducing all sexist social and political organization across the planet to patriarchy alone. Patriarchy is a term that was imposed by the global north and is now un-usefully universalized. While patriarchy is often posited in the spirit of building commonalities and solidarities across borders, unfortunately it inadvertently reproduces skewed visions, white feminist domination, and divisions by missing what may be fundamental in gender, sexuality, colonial, racial, and class relations of power in sites inside and outside the global north. Moreover, patriarchy often appears in analyses that reproduce colonialism-and-race-amnesia, and the erasure of lesbians, queers, and trans people, albeit unintentionally. In contrast, as a large rubric, misogynarchies allows for identifying other kinds of sexist and queerphobic formations that do not correspond to patriarchy, or that are as yet un-named and even unthought at all.
Yet another concept to think about power with is situated planetarities. It is an approach to analyzing relations of power in any local (situated) site and for configuring activisms, with sensitivity to the entire world (planetarities). For example, many queer scholars and activists of color have pointed out how gay marriage in the United States benefits privileged gays and lesbians, and how, by excluding and marginalizing more extremely subalternized queers and nearly all trans people, gay marriage actually creates harm. With situated planetarities in mind, we can ask: what do struggles for gay marriage rights mean for (queer and not queer) indigenous peoples in the United States, a settler colony? For (queer and not queer) Palestinians? How does assimilating US LGBTQI+ people into US nationalnormativity reinforce the United States’ capacity to mobilize its population for genocide in Palestine or in the present unprovoked murderous war in Iran? Instead, if we think with situated planetarities, with the local and the world in mind, we can better configure situated liberatory freedom-exigent action and strategies that neither exclude nor injure anyone else. Situated planetarities provides a perspective that can totally shift our analyses and struggles.
Co-Motion also puts forth several ways to approach subject formation and subjects’ lives. One is a Gramscian-inspired notion of subaltern-to-dominant continuum. It aims to move beyond the binary of the subaltern vs the dominant subject and instead to recognize multiple subject co-constitutions and positionings across a spectrum. Subaltern-to-dominant continuum also helps explain how a person’s social location is not fixed but can change from one context to another. An example is how an upper-middle-class African person who in their own African country is inside a relatively dominant social sector, becomes in Europe and the United States a subalternized, Co-Motion also proposes the anti-essentialist notion of subalternative. Inspired by discussions among francophone feminist and queer scholars and activists of color, subalternative goes beyond the often essentialized idea of the subaltern, to make clear that some subalterns, like everyone else, do not necessarily act in the interests of subalterns and can instead reproduce relations of power, while some other subalterns do radically disrupt relations of power and critically create liberatory alternatives.
Another concept, incited by Indian and decolonial queer thought, is subjects-in-sociality and another. The idea of in-sociality is aligned with Indian sociological critiques of the presupposed universality of the Enlightenment individual subject, a model that under colonialism was imposed globally. Instead, I use in-sociality to recognize that subjects are co-constituted in social relations in specific societies and not in isolation or abstraction. The term and another functions as a place holder for subjects who are not (yet) intelligible or who are otherwise absent in an analysis. In other words, there is always someone more subalternized than ourselves and whomever we imagine as the most extreme subaltern. The notion of and another, by putting into relief that someone or something is absent and keeps open a space for them, also reminds us that our analyses are never complete, always in process.
Co-Motion’s last chapter aims to show how the book’s concepts can work in practice. It focuses on lesbian, queer, and trans of color movements and their co-motion in Paris from the 1970s to today. To do so, it proposes what I call a backwards-sideways socio-historical methodology. It consists of two parts. The first is a genealogical approach (backwards) in the sense of Foucault — thus an organization of movement history by beginning in the present and then going towards the past. The second is a deep horizontal contextualization (sideways) at every historical moment that tells us what was happening alongside, against, and/or with the social movement. Besides operationalizing many of the book’s concepts, the chapter offers for the first time a history of previously dismissed and erased lesbian, queer, and trans of color movements in France.
In sum, I hope the book contributes to bringing us all some food for thought and action as we navigate a world that is increasingly more violently colonial-racist, right-wing, and fascist. For more information see: https://www.dukeupress.edu/co-motion.