Publications: Trauma, silence, and displacement in postcolonial feminist perspectives

Books

Shadows of Nothingness: Queering Silence and Absence in Global Politics

Aytak Dibavar, Shadows of Nothingness: Queering Silence and Absence in Global Politics. Columbia University Press (Forthcoming May 2025).

Queer World-making in Contemporary Iran: Rumination on Soft Utopia

Aytak Dibavar, Queer Worldmaking in Contemporary Iran: Rumination on Soft Utopia. (Under Review).

Queer Hope and Futurity: Locating Otherwise in the Global South

Aytak Dibavar, Ahmad Qais Munhazim, and Akanksha Mehta, eds., Queer Hope and Futurity: Locating Otherwise in the Global South. under review by Oxford University Press.

BOOK CHAPTERS

Transnational Feminist Solidarities: Decolonial Imaginaries and Feminist Revolutions

Aytak Dibavar, “Transnational Feminist Solidarities: Decolonial Imaginaries and Feminist Revolutions,” in Birgit Poopuu, Xymena Kurowska, and Shivani Singh(ed), Handbook of Knowledge and Expertise in International Politics (Oxford University Press), Forthcoming Fall 2024.

Race, Gender and Culture in International Relations

Aytak Akbari-Dibavar, “Race and Gender in IR,” in Alina Sajed and Randolph Persaud (eds), Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations, (London: Routledge Publications, March 2018).

Excerpt:
This first chapter introduces readers to the main theoretical orientations within postcolonial studies, but also to the most prominent postcolonial theorists associated with these orientations. Additionally, it also discusses the relevance of race and gender to better understand past and contemporary world politics.

Bodies that Haunt: Rethinking the Political Economy

Aytak Akbari-Dibavar, “Embodied Memory: Sufism and Hauntology,” in Diyah Rachmi Larasati and Emily Mitamura (eds), Bodies that Haunt: Rethinking the Political Economy, (2022)

Excerpt:

This project convenes an interdisciplinary, transnational group of scholars, students, and artists to rethink how we study the political economy of death in and around the Global South.

This new research collaborative is thus dedicated to interrogating classic concerns of political economy in global flows of bodies, labor, and capital, as well as the emotional and aesthetic underbellies of these processes. In this way we bring questions of cultural value, visuality, art, and desire to bear on how death is represented and consumed in global society.

Centrally, our research asks: How do bodies transgress the frames that construe them as exchangeable objects in global economies and imaginaries (Hong and Ferguson 2011; Thi Nguyen 2012)? How can we critically reimagine bodies, particularly the excesses and hauntings which characterize racialized death, in order to understand, respect, and amplify these transgressions (Million 2013; Hartman 1997)? With what consequence for racialized life today?

JOURNAL ARTICLES

Stories from home for the classroom: Teach feminist decolonial theori(es)

Aytak Dibavar, “Stories from Home for the Classroom: Teaching Decolonial Feminist Theori(es),” Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research 9, no. 1 (2023): https://kohljournal.press/stories-home-classroom

Excerpt:
How do we attend to the delicate task of teaching and conceptualizing decolonial and transnational feminisms within institutions with colonial histories? How do we “decolonise” women, gender, and sexuality studies? How can we teach/learn gender and sexuality in or of the “Middle East”/ “West Asia”? What/whose knowledges are shared? What is or should be front staged in our classrooms and what should be kept silent or back staged?

These questions and sensations have been central to the development of my pedagogical practice; they inform the location from which I enter “our” classroom – a classroom that is constructed and framed to help me and my co-travelers/students find hope (or forcefully practice radical hope), in the present moment of utter defeat.

Responsibility to Nothingness

Aytak Dibavar, “Responsibility to Nothingness,” The Site Magazine, 1, no. 2 (2022): 1-10.

Excerpt:
In my work, I move through Islamic Sufism and a decolonial feminist reading of quantum physics to queer our understanding of concepts such as silence, absence, and nothingness. 1 In many ways, what has historically been deemed “nothing” (nothing important, nothing relevant, nothing significant) has either been erased, violated, or colonized. We can cull examples like terra nullius, the lands deemed empty and void by a European audience, thereby justifying their colonization. The people to whom these lands belonged were equally considered devoid of “meaning or value,” and therefore the massacre, displacement, and enslavement of those whose bodies, lives, and lifestyles were justified. Or we can consider the coloniality of knowledge. Bodies of knowledge produced outside of the colonial world have been historically treated as lesser than, offering no significant contribution, and therefore either erased or ignored. And, finally, we can think of the absences and the void that has been (and continues to be) created due to the violent process of colonial and imperial erasure. So, the question that I seek to answer is how can nothingness and void be reworked into a historical archive—one we cannot avoid, turn a blind eye to, or ignore?

A short reflection on the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement

Aytak Dibavar, "A Short Reflection on the 'Woman, Life, Freedom' Movement,” Kohl: A Journal for for Body and Gender Research 9, no.1 (2023): https://kohljournal.press/woman-life-freedom Aytak Dibavar, “(Re)Claiming Gender: A Case for Feminist Decolonial Social Reproduction Theory,” Global Constitutionalism 11, no. 3 (2022): 450–64. doi:10.1017/S2045381721000216

Excerpt:
This short reflection comes as a later addition to my article in light of the enfolding events in Iran. As this special issue focuses on “Anti-colonial Feminist Imaginaries,” I find it necessary to heed the current movement in Iran in my writing. I add this reflection, therefore, to address three important points that hold significance in our current juncture. As a feminist who researches and teaches from decolonial, queer, anti-racist, and anti-imperial perspectives, I think it is important to answer one of the most prominent questions about this uprising head on, which is whether the current movement in Iran is a feminist revolution or not. I think that this question in and of itself needs to be divided into two sections. First, what is a revolution? And second, what type of feminism is in question here? Oftentimes in colonial modernity, when we talk about revolution, we mean the sudden replacement of an elite group in a nation-state with another. I do have a hard time reconciling that notion of revolution with feminist ethics, or at least with what I define as feminism - a perspective that can help us see how race, gender, class, ability, and sexuality are historically located and co-constituted. Hence, a revolution that tends to replace a privileged elite group with another cannot be at its core a feminist revolution. However, if by revolution we mean a spontaneous surge that interrupts patriarchal discourse, gendered apartheid, and systematic control over female body in the name of religion and state, then my answer is yes. Yes, what is taking place in Iran, the “woman, life, freedom” movement, is indeed a feminist revolution.

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