Beyond Antagonism: the Hybrid as a Model of Postcolonial Queer Subjectivity

The objective of this text is to make a localized attempt at ‘thinking through hybridity’ to illustrate the analytical potential of an interdisciplinary dialogue between gender studies, postcolonial criticism and transnational studies that have yet to be applied to and proved out against the Russian context. Th e first part of the essay is devoted to the reconstruction of the postcolonial theory of hybridity put forward by Homi K. Bhabha. Deconstructing the essentialist political ontology of postcolonial theory, Bhabha uses the concepts of hybridity and the third space for a poststructuralist redefi nition of the subjectivities of the colonizer and the subaltern in the logic of mutual supplementarity. Th e grammar of colonial discourses is inevitably build around an antagonistic dichotomy of us/them, in which the identity of each element is contingent upon the devaluation of the opposite figure. In this grammar, the colonizer and the colonized essentialize their subjectivities as if they preceded the colonial encounter, whereas it is in fact the encounter event that sets signification to work, deploying a space that opens the horizon for the both sides’ identity politics. Next, I will consider adjacent articulations of hybridity in gender studies, poststructuralist feminism and queer theory. Representing an alternative to the feminist concept of intersectionality, the queer theory of hybridity allows for a deconstruction of the self-referential master-subject, in the spirit of Bhabha’s post-colonial theory understanding any subjectivity as an always already hybrid effect of multiple power relations. The postcolonial and queer-theoretical concepts of hybridity allow moving beyond the conventional political ontology of the autonomous (national) subject, paving way for a more nuanced genealogical analysis of biopolitical exclusion technologies. By a consideration of some aspects of the recent Russian sexual biopolitics in the context of postcolonial discussions on Russia’s global positionality, the final part of the essay in a most general form conjures a space for a dialogue between the theoretical projects of postcolonial and queer theories of hybridity.