Amanda Álvares Ferreira analyses the reproduction of the discourse on sovereignty in International Relations as a mechanism of fixation of bodily identity, in line with Judith Butler’s and Michel Foucault’s body of work.

By looking at the politics of death in the Brazilian context, Amanda Álvares Ferreira explores the intersections of race and gender as investments that demarcate abjection and constitute a specific necropolitical practice (the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die) that are characteristic and derivative of its colonisation process.

Most importantly, the contribution in this work is to provide an alternative focus on sovereignty as adopted by Lauren Berlant and Georges Bataille, where agency invested in a rational and decision-making subject is contested once sovereignty is proposed as product of a moment, and of excess. As an attempt to expand queer theory’s questioning of identity politics, Ferreira investigates how a bataillan perspective on sovereignty can help us understand the limits of agency in terms of identities; considering their normalisation as a constant reframing of individuation in the productive terms of modernity.

About the speaker 

Amanda Álvares Ferreira is PhD candidate at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, and master by the same institution. She is currently working as Associate Professor at Instituto Brasileiro de Ensino, Desenvolvimento e Pesquisa, in Brasília.

Her current research is focused on queer and cuir theories and decolonial feminisms in IR, with a special focus in Latin America, and she has also conducted research on prostitution and sex trafficking in Brazil. Amanda has recently published an article at the journal Contexto Internacional, where she discussed lesbian activism in Brazil, at the occasion of the celebration of Stonewall’s 50th anniversary.

This event is part of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) Global Voices Seminar Series.