“Towards a Decolonial Account of Desire: Settler-Colonial Cultivation and Indigenous Women’s Self-Making and Resistance in Early Modern Turtle Island (North America)” by Janice Feng on June 5, at 15:05-

Date and time:  5 June 2026, 3:05pm–4:35pm

Venue: Room 203, Building 3, Waseda Campus

Speaker: Janice Feng, Assistant Professor of Political Studies and Philosophy, Trent University

Title: “Towards a Decolonial Account of Desire: Settler-Colonial Cultivation and Indigenous Women’s Self-Making and Resistance in Early Modern Turtle Island (North America)”

Abstract:
European settler-colonization of Turtle Island (North America) since the early modern period aimed to turn Indigenous lands into imperial territory, and Indigenous peoples from sovereign entities into subjects of empire. Specifically, the French colonial project in New France hinged on what I call “settler-colonial cultivation of desire,” meaning that colonizers sought to reshape Indigenous peoples’ “nature” by (re)-conditioning their bodies and cultivating their minds and reason. In response, Indigenous peoples, especially Indigenous women, pursued forms of self-making and alternative attachments that were both conditioned by and disrupted the imperial narrative of desire and settler-colonial cultivation of desire. In this talk, I specifically look at Indigenous women’s ascetic practices. Situating them within the historical context and Indigenous cultural traditions, I argue that practices such as self-mortification illustrate a gendered self-making and cultivated alternative form of desire. While Indigenous women engaged in these practices were often hailed by missionaries as exceptionally pious Catholics and subjects of empire, converting and embodying piety rather enabled Indigenous women to cultivate and sustain attachment to their homeland and kin in a world marked by war, epidemic, forced migration, and colonial encroachment. Cultivating these attachments, in other words, was also cultivating a world that could nourish these attachments. From these practices, I develop a decolonial feminist account of desire.

Bio:
Janice Feng is Assistant Professor of Political Studies and Philosophy at Trent University, Canada. She has taught and published in the areas of history of political thought, settler colonial studies and Indigenous political thought, feminist and queer theory, critical theory and continental philosophy, and post-colonial political thought. As a feminist political theorist, her research engages with questions of subjectivity and subjection, embodiment, desire, and resistance, in the contexts of empire, settler colonialism and decolonization in Turtle Island and Asia-Pacific, specifically Taiwan. Her book project examines settler-colonial cultivation of desire and Indigenous women’s self-making and resistance in early modern northeastern Turtle Island (North America). She has also started working on a project on the development of Taiwanese anti-colonial political thought during Japanese colonial rule.

Language: English

Audience: Public (no registration required)

Organizer: Comparative Political Theory Project, WINPEC, Waseda University

Contact: Kei Hiruta (kei.hiruta{at}waseda.jp)