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Co-Motion

Re-Thinking Power, Subjects, and Feminist and Queer Alliances

Cover of Co-Motion features abstract designs resembling paint splatters, cut up paper, and undulating lines appear on a dark background. Dots of paint vary in size, reminiscent of the solar system. Read the Introduction

Book

Pages: 288

Illustrations: 13 illustrations

Published: January 2026

Author: Paola Bacchetta

In Co-Motion, theorist Paola Bacchetta proposes a new lexicon for analyzing power, subjects and alliances. Employing what she calls ‘theory-assemblages’ to describe how diverse theoretical and political approaches inspire movements and produce different kinds of alliances, Bacchetta engages the inseparability of power relations—such as colonialism, capitalism, racism, caste, misogyny, and speciesism—and how their combinations, operability, and the analyses they require, shift in different contexts and lives of subjects. Focusing on France, India, Italy, and the US from the 1970s to the present, Co-Motion addresses a wide activist, artivist, and social movement archive— group statements, banners, pamphlets, graffiti, posters, poetry, sit-ins, films, art exhibits—to think and feel with the many ways that people, historically and today, come together to act. Through her expansive engagement with varied bodies of scholarship, sites of analysis, and kinds of reading, Bacchetta offers new approaches to analyze, confront, and transforming power, and to enact freedom.

Praise

“In this stunningly original and thoroughly provocative book, Paola Bacchetta proposes a new critical vocabulary for grasping alliances, solidarities, and the analytics of power. Co-Motion is an impressively thorough and synthetic survey of contemporary feminist and queer theories for thinking about social change and revolution beyond the borders that now restrict us—and toward a planetary scale.” - Mimi Thi Nguyen, author of The Promise of Beauty

“Bacchetta continues to be one of the most important intellectuals of this generation and this book demonstrates exactly why that is the case. Co-Motion creates a compelling and dense lexicon for understanding the present conditions and functionality of power within what she calls situated planetarities. As opposed to the global, a planetary approach is a powerful corrective to much contemporary scholarship on the global. It’s digestible and yet profoundly comprehensive.” - Karma R. Chavez, author of The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance

"Co-Motion will be invaluable to social movements and activists across the world, given its inspirational and practical dispositions." - Dennis Ekwemnachukwu Okeke, Cultural Studies

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Paola Bacchetta is Professor and Chair in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at University of California, Berkeley. She is author or co-editor of multiple books, including Gender in the Hindu Nation and Fatima Mernissi For Our Times, Global Raciality, Right-Wing Women.

Table Of Contents

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Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. Openings  1
1. Co-Motion at Present  33
2. Imaginings Otherwise  70
3. Co-Formations, Co-Productions  103
4. Situated Planetarities  139
5. Other Sensings in Praxis  175
Appendix A. “Our Queer Pride Is Anti-Racist”  217
Appendix B. Pride for Whom? Pride for What? The Opportunism of Alliances and Visibility  219
Appendix C. Racialized Queers and Trans Against Homonationalism  223
Notes  225
References  231
Index  265

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3297-7 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-2953-3 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6172-4 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478061724