ABSTRACT
Responding to the harm to queer students and workers caused by exploitative diversity work in universities, this chapter imagines a queer manifesto against LGBT+ inclusion in higher education. It draws on anti-assimilationist, anti-work, and abolitionist queer politics, to envision how established analyses of diversity work can be put into practice to struggle over inclusion as work. The chapter reflects on the process of writing a queer anti-inclusion manifesto, develops manifesto writing as method, and considers tensions arising from our approach. We then present our provisional manifesto: WAGES AGAINST INCLUSION! FULL INCLUSION NOW! The manifesto refuses LGBT+ inclusion regimes in universities via sometimes contradictory demands: that queers are paid for the compulsory unpaid labour of LGBT+ inclusion; that queers withdraw that labour until our demands are met; and that, rather than less inclusion, we demand fully collectivised “inclusion” in our workplaces, education systems, and economies of knowledge production. The manifesto offers strategies for navigating the ambivalences of both needing and refusing inclusion, and for making inclusion in the university no longer necessary.
