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 required, 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 for analyzing, confronting and transforming power, and enacting freedom.

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.

“In this stunningly original and thoroughly provocative book, Paola Bacchetta proposes a new critical vocabulary for grasping alliances, solidarities, and 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