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43When does a native become a settler? (With apologies to Zreik and Mamdani)Constellations 29 (1): 3-18. 2022.Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 3-18, March 2022.
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40Violent AttachmentsPolitical Theory 48 (1): 4-29. 2020.Drawing on feminist and queer critiques that see violence as constitutive of identities, this essay points to subject-positions whose construction is necessarily conditioned by exercising violence. Focusing on settler colonialism, I reverse the optics of the first set of critiques: rather than seeing the self as taking form through the injuries she suffers, I try to understand selves that are structurally constituted by causing injury to others. This analysis refuses the assumption that violence…Read more
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31On Abstractness: First Wave Liberal Feminism and the Construction of the Abstract WomanFeminist Studies 35 (3): 495-522. 2009.
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31Lauren Berlant’s legacy in contemporary political theoryContemporary Political Theory 22 (1): 118-142. 2023.
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23When does a native become a settler?Constellations 29 (1): 3-18. 2022.Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 3-18, March 2022.
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22Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied PalestineTheory, Culture and Society 28 (1): 55-80. 2011.Looking at one site, the Israeli checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territory, this article seeks to understand the mechanisms by which violence can present itself as justifiable, even when it materializes within frames presumably set to annul it. We look at the checkpoints as a condensed microcosmos operating within two such frames. One is the prolonged Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process’, and the other is regulatory power, which in the Foucauldian framework presumably sidelines the violen…Read more
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9Little Chinese Feet Encased in Iron ShoesPolitical Theory 43 (3): 334-355. 2015.This essay traces the evocations of the Chinese practice of foot-binding in Western political thought. I examine the changing deployments of the image: as a contrast to European freedom or as a mirror reflecting its own limitations. The bound feet not merely illustrate a lack of freedom through an image of disabled mobility. They also situate freedom within global and gendered frameworks. Via a reading of the image and its contexts, we see that European freedom-as-movement emerged on the backdro…Read more
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4Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of MobilityDuke University Press. 2015.We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In _Movement and the Ordering of Freedom_, Hagar Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control …Read more
Hagar Kotef
SOAS, University of London