Nadiya Chushak, Professor, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
Maria Mayerchyk, Senior Research Associate, Ethnology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine, Kule Project Archivist, Kule Folklore Centre, University of Alberta
Olga Plakhotnik, Researcher, University of Greifswald
What is sexuality – if we look at its macro-social dimension within the global regime of power? What is decoloniality – given the increasing usage of the word and its new momentum of popularity after the beginning of the full-scale Russian war on Ukraine? And how are these two epistemic categories linked? The decolonial option understands coloniality as a global matrix of power that rules the contemporary world, and sexuality is one of its pillars – together with gender, economy/ governmentality, and epistemologies/ knowledge production. To see sexuality from the decolonial perspective and decolonize it, therefore, would mean questioning the modern concepts of sexuality/ gender – as well as race/ ethnicity, capitalism, nation-states, emancipation, norms, anthropocentrism, and the very idea of what human is. The course aims at a critical in-depth exploration of how sexuality is intertwined with other epistemic categories and social differentials from a decolonial perspective and how the project of decolonization might look in the context of Ukraine.