Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation

This paper seeks to think of location from the perspective of belonging to rethink a "politics of location" as a "politics of relation." I draw upon literature from third world and antiracist feminisms and cultural studies in order to ask: what gets left out when the conditions and effects of belonging to a "location" are assumed as a starting point for our theorizing? To map out and interrogate such conditions create new possibilities for theorizing collective subjectivity. And by extension, a politics of relation asks us to interrogate how we may hold ourselves accountable for who we are (becoming, as a function of belonging), and the collective conditions out of which our agency, experience, and consciousness emerge. I propose "differential belonging"—a tactical maneuvering across resistive communities—as a vehicle for feminist subjects to rewrite/reverse processes of interpellation.