A simple question: What is Europe? is often focal for numerous disciplines such as area studies, cultural geography, history, postcolonial studies, and recently also gender & sexuality studies. Although richly diverse, perhaps one common thread among them would be an inclination to show that Europe, while surly denoting a continent, a place on a map (the where of it) - is also more than just a simple geographical indication of place. It is a specific idea of culture, of politics, of relations, of humanity, of the world order (Miklóssy and Korhonen 2010; Gossman 2010; Spiering and Wintle 2002; Pagden 2002; Wilson and Dussen 1995).
Connected, but less often asked, is another important question in thinking Europe: When is Europe? That is: what are the explicit and implicit temporalities that govern imaginations of that place? For example, how temporal signifiers of ‘progress/backwardness’, ‘civilisation/barbarity’, ‘science/spirituality’ designate telos of society and culture and re/inscribe racialised categories on the populations across continents; how specific time and temporality become, as I have just written above: “a specific idea of culture, of politics, of relations, of humanity, of the world order” itself.
In this chapter, I want to think more about these elusive concoctions of geographies and time: geo-temporalities, symbolically marked by a hyphen of connection, and yet still, a denture of separation. It alludes to un-separable nature of the place/location and cultural perceptions of time/temporality, and as a result to the socio-political consequences of such collusions. In particular, the affirmation and contestation of what is gender, (homo)sexuality, and knowledge is the central focus of interrogation in trans-national politics as a litmus test of ‘globalization’, ‘Europeanization’, the idea of Europe and the ‘civilisation’ itself. Gender, sexuality, and (il)legitimacy of knowledge about them that has become the implicit and explicit battleground of political ideologies and strategies, variably expounded across the left-liberal-conservative-right continuum. The attitudes towards, understandings of, representations of, relations to, perceptions of, identities and/or practices of gender, sexuality (especially homosexuality) and the knowledge produced about them, have become the defining markers of what Europe might have, has been, does, should have, will have signified. And the different grammatical tenses here are deliberately used to highlight the underlying temporality in our operationalisations of the symbolic and material dimension of ideas, practices, places.
As I take time and give space to revisiting how myself and others have been thinking about geo-temporalities of Europe and homo/sexualities, I am guided by the question: what relations and convergences of power/knowledge can be observed when thinking towards a critical, queer-oriented, Central and Eastern European (CEE) epistemological perspectives? And what decolonial frameworks emerge to destabilize occidentalism, and potentially re/compose socio-political agora, when CEE becomes not an afterthought of queer studies (or decolonial thought, or post-colonial studies, for that matter), but a minaret of enunciation of contemporary (queer) ideas, aspirations, practices?
Citation
Kulpa, R. (2025). Re-Thinking “Europe” with Central-Eastern Europe: Towards Non-Occidentalist and Decolonial Epistemics in/of Queer Studies. In Go West! Conceptual Explorations of “the West” in the History of Education ( 181-203). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111408989-011
Online Publication Date
Mar 31, 2025
Publication Date
2025
Deposit Date
Mar 18, 2025
Publicly Available Date
Mar 18, 2025
Publisher
De Gruyter
Peer Reviewed
Peer Reviewed
Pages
181-203
Book Title
Go West! Conceptual Explorations of “the West” in the History of Education
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Reduce inequality within and among countries
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Re-Thinking “Europe” with Central-Eastern Europe: Towards Non-Occidentalist and Decolonial Epistemics in/of Queer Studies
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