Queering and Decolonizing the Critique

Critique is the epicenter of science. For reproducible, trustworthy, and accurate science and medical practices that stand the test of time and lived experiences of patients and publics, we need rigorous critiques of knowledge, its methods of production, and ends. Theories of critique are also crucial for sensemaking in science, especially in these times marked by polycrisis in world affairs as well as remarkable possibilities for health care innovation.

Critique is not limited, however, to fact-checking and appropriateness of research methodology and conclusions. Critique also calls for a broadening in the scope of critical inquiry, for example, by situating research and clinical practices in a larger societal, historical, and political context.

Politics relates to unpacking power in its various forms and formats—how power is shared, where, when, by whom and which methods, and to what ends. Unpacking and holding power to account are core dimensions of critique because science, knowledge, and health care are inherently power-laden and thus, political (Foucault, 2003).

Poet, essayist, and public intellectual Audre Lorde (1934–1992) made foundational contributions to the intersectionality of politics, identity, and feminist thought. Lorde’s quote in the preamble of this editorial essay underlines the importance of holding to account power and politics attendant to the structures in which individuals, institutions, and communities are embedded. These structures include, for example, the colonial-, class-, gender-, and race-based injustices whose legacies live on today in planetary health and society (Fanon, 1963; Reinhart, 2021; Robinson et al., 2019). Lorde’s quote makes it clearer that genuine progressive social change cannot happen by an atomized narrow gaze on individuals or a single issue or institution without questioning the underlying structures that cause the problems and social injustices in the first place. Hence, for robust critique, the linkages among the personal, the structural, and the historical ought to be unpacked. This approach recognizes the important connections between individuals and the systemic structures that impact struggles in illness and health as causes-of-causes. Without this robust critique, the scientific and medical contents become hollow and lack meaning, and power remains unchecked. Yet, accomplishing such broad critical inquiry is not always easy. And it is here that “queering and decolonizing the critique” offer opportunities.

The word “queer” has a storied history grounded in civil rights movements, social theory, and sex and gender that contest entrenched and ossified normative categories. A queer reading and critique questions the dominant cisheteronormative assumptions in science, medicine, academia, and society: what gets to count as “the normal” and “the legitimate,” who is erased or silenced, and who is privileged and glorified, and why (Özdemir, 2025). The following seminar at the Feminist Autonomous Center for Research in Athens is accessible online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA4jj8C7MQI) and decodes/unpacks the word queer historically, and in the contemporary context for readers interested in queer theory and theories of critique.

Importantly, what is meant by “queering,” as a verb, is not limited to sexuality and gender. Queering of science, knowledge, medicine, or life for that matter challenges the entrenched hegemonic assumptions and power structures and reductionist binary thinking and thus broadens the inquiries in a given field, including a veritable expansion from knowledge to its historical and political contexts. Therefore, queering is relevant to rigorous critiques in crosscutting creative productions in science, arts, film, literature, journalism, engineering, and planetary health.

Queering the critique invites us to think about time in ways that are decolonial, nonlinear, transcend the present moment, and question the hegemonic accounts of history. As historians are well aware, the colonial archives of science and society are not impartial, and this calls for reading against the grain and tracing omissions and erasures. For example, the emergence of the textile and iron industries and the move from agrarian and rural to urban societies in the 18^th and 19^th centuries are often explained by the rise of steam power. A queer and decolonial reading uncovers that the histories of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism are closely entangled and that the colonial extraction from the countries of the Global South and accumulation of capital and raw materials in Europe and the Global North for manufacturing preceded the Industrial Revolutions of the past centuries (Fanon, 1963; Robinson et al., 2019; Smith, 2020). A critique that is historically- and critically-informed on the living colonial legacies is so vital to unpack and understand science and planetary health in the 21^st century.

We are currently traversing through an era of extreme digital transformation of all life 24 h a day. But digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are often falsely understood as though they exist only in the immaterial world of cyberspace with no environmental material impacts. AI and digital transformation have massive energy and water demands and physical impacts on planetary ecosystems. Queering of the critique can help us to think across the current silos of the digital and physical worlds. Indeed, the Internet has materiality and depends on undersea cables (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gsvr-6a6vg). We must question and queer the popular imaginations of, and uncritical and false assumptions about, digital automation and digital health existing in the ether in an immaterial world, without environmental dependencies and ecological costs.

It is of historical and contemporary interest that the omission of politics from science and medicine, as well as economic analyses, is not new. Since the age of Enlightenment in the 17^th century, politics has been disarticulated from science and economics by classical liberalism, an ahistorical approach to critique that continues into the 21^st century (Özdemir, 2019). A queering and decolonizing lens would also help by allowing us to extend our critical gaze beyond the present moment, through ideology critique and tracing the lineage of the history of ideas such as classical liberalism and its connections with the contemporary (and false) understandings of science and health care as being apolitical and ahistorical practices.

Critique is often focused on knowledge rather than the ways in which we know, i.e., the field of epistemology that asks questions on how do we know what we know. Power and politics also exist in the types of epistemologies and metanarratives we choose in the production of knowledge (Özdemir, 2019, 2024). Metanarratives and epistemologies are scaffolds, structures, and types of metadata in which knowledge lives and breathes, enlightens, inspires, and liberates, or suffocates or misinforms. Choosing our metanarratives critically, by unpacking various forms of power and politics, is vital for people, communities, institutions, countries, social justice, and planetary health.

Queering and decolonizing the critique from hegemonic metanarratives expand our analytical gaze on the politics-laden epistemological choices made prior to knowledge production. For example, think of the question of whether health is a commodity or a universal human right. The “health as commodity” metanarrative and attendant privatization of healthcare conflict with, and subtract from, the right to health and health for all, and health as a universal human right.

Politics of knowledge production in science and medicine have long been of strong interest to scholars in social sciences and humanities. A recent book underlines the ways in which politics and power-laden discourses and practices exist not only within scientific and medical communities but also in social sciences and humanities (Fassin and Steinmetz, 2023). This book traces the entanglement of the social sciences in the social facts they analyze. Queering the critique would expand the current analyses of power and politics in knowledge production in multiple disciplines, including within the social sciences and humanities epistemic communities that have hitherto assumed an allegedly neutral science observer role (Özdemir, 2019).

In all, a queer analytical reading, and queering and decolonizing the critique, foster systems thinking that is vital for omics science and new—democratic, critically, historically, and epistemologically informed—ways of seeing health, well-being, and illness, and for critically questioning the hegemonic definitions of the normal by politics and power. Queering the critique also builds bridges across knowledge silos and time, between the past, present, and the futures in the current era of polycrisis on the planet.