Queer Aesthetics; From Identity Politics to Queer Politics as Equality-Based Politics

This article tries to show the queer aspect of Jacques Rancière's methodology in his political theory. For Rancière, the political is an aesthetic act that changes the distribution of the sensible in the police order and how to face the world. Police order is a corporal and spatial order that creates particular ways of thinking, speaking, seeing, and visibility through the distribution of the sensible by the bodies. The aesthetic side of political action deals with redistributing this order due to expanding the boundaries of senses. Then, based on the triple regimes of Rancière's art, a triple model of body regimes in gender studies is presented to show how the queer body as an aesthetic one, under the concept of the body without organs, approaches the political subject/body in Rancière's view. To comprehend the queer side of Rancière's theory and the political dimension of Judith Butler's theory examine the idea of performativity. Subsequently, to analyze politics of identity/difference and queer politics, Rancière's thoughts compare with Axel Honneth's theory. To clarify the link between Rancière's theories and queer politics, the affect theory and distribution of emotions and their function on/between bodies is referred to, as the political economy of emotions.