5 Oct – Seminar: Theorising Intimate Security – Gilbert Caluya

Brought to you by the Gender and Sexuality Studies Research Network, Deakin’s “First Fridays” free public seminar series continues on 5 October, with Gilbert Caluya (University of Melbourne) presenting. The seminar begins at 4pm, with drinks from 5pm. Held at Deakin Downtown (727 Collins St, near Southern Cross Station), this seminar series is open to people interested in the work, but bookings are required.

Theorising Intimate Security: Affect and Post-Racial Politics

From Gilbert: The rise of Trump and the Alt-Right in the US, UKIP and Brexit in the UK, and the return of Pauline Hanson and the emergence of UPF and Reclaim in Australia are symptoms of the resurgence of a racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic right whose growing success has shocked Western mainstream media over the last few years. This has resulted in leftist hand-wringing in op-eds blaming ‘identity politics’ for single-handedly sidelining the real victims of neoliberalism: white working-class men.

Yet if we look at the backlash against so-called ‘identity politics’, it is shaped in a decidedly two-pronged form: the resurgence of a conservative intimacy surrounding notions of traditional family values, and the bolstering of national security under the rhetoric of counter-terrorism. Along these battlelines, ‘intimacy’ and ‘security’ are continuously co-mingling and clashing, forming new knots and reconfiguring new conundrums in the contemporary political landscape in what I refer to as ‘intimate security’.

In this paper I draw on Lauren Berlant, Ann Laura Stoler, David Theo Goldberg, Raymond Williams and Elspeth Probyn among others to theorise intimate security as a structure of feeling that draws upon a number of different social, cultural and political developments in the intimate logics of security and the securitisation of intimacy. I contend that one of the main drivers for this structure of feeling is the survival of racism under the post-racial state. The logics of racism survives through the protection of the private via liberal freedom and security via notions emergency. Intimate security emerges through these two sites of exception, entraining a certain affective, sensory response to the world and events that ironically justifies the unequal distribution of security and intimacy.

About the Speaker

Dr Gilbert Caluya is a Lecturer in Screen and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne where he teaches both in the Screen and Cultural Studies and Gender Studies programs. His research has focused on race and the cultural politics of intimacy across several cultural sites: sexual subcultures, cultural citizenship, digital cultures and everyday cultures of security. He has been a recipient of the University of Sydney Medal, the Gay and Lesbian Archives Thesis Prize and an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award. This paper draws together his research from his DECRA on intimate citizenship in postcolonial Australia.

For more information and to register, click here.

Future Seminars

2 November—Eben Kirksey (Deakin), with Tamara Pertamina
7 December—Aileen Moreton-Robinson (QUT)

The Gender and Sexuality Studies Research Network blog contains registration details, recordings of past seminars where available and links to other events.