‘Essays in refusal’: Decolonial feminist strategies that subvert and refuse the politics of the neoliberal university

The theories underpinning gender/feminist studies, alongside critical race studies and queer studies, are rooted in historic, intersecting, radical social movements, driven by communities who were and remain oppressed by states, societies and institutions. Individuals who work in these fields therefore hold an ambiguous relationship with the university, often experiencing it as a site of both material potential and co-optation. In this article, I explore whether, and how, those in this contradictory position can carve out space and time from within institutional thresholds to engage in decolonial feminist praxes. Abolitionist theorists have sketched the figure of the ‘subversive intellectual’, whose labour is paradoxically indispensable to and disowned by the university. Seeking the material existence of this figure, I held conversations with subversive intellectuals. My analysis of these interviews follows queer and posthuman feminist thinkers who invest in the political potential of the body – and the multiplicity of its possible relations with space, time and other bodies – for counter-institutional action. In this article, my aim is not to determine what role, if any, the subversive intellectual has in the university’s abolition, but I do share and make connections between the stories of individuals who are re-orientating relationships, spaces and time towards an imagined future, and who are collectively embracing a queer uprising from within the university.