When You Say Queer, I Hear Decolonise: Colonial Archives, Deviant Sexualities and Normative Media (original) (raw)

2019, Feminist Review Blog

When designing the third-year course ‘Race, Cinema and Nation’ for students of the School of Media and Design at the Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University, I learnt of the role that anthropology played in the formation of what Fatimah Tobing Rony (1996, p. 8) has defined as ethnographic cinema—that is, films which situate indigenous people in a ‘displaced temporal realm’. As Rony demonstrates, although the so-called ‘savages’ and civilised men occupied the same space and certainly lived in the same time, filmic renditions of the theory of evolution depicted ‘primitives’ as spatially and historically distant so extensively that we still take the anachronism of natives for granted (ibid., pp. 130–131). Watching King Kong (1933), my students and I directed our attention to the complex configuration of minor tropes: the mist wrapping Skull Island, drums threateningly rolling from distance, unintelligible words being sang to an unknown god and, rather expectedly, scantily dressed men dancing in a circle. This daring actualisation of the voyage theme perfectly visualises how anthropologists’ differentiation of humankind into ‘ethnographiable’ and ‘historifiable’ (ibid., p. 7) relied upon a manufactured hiatus between pre-history and modernity, which was moreover grounded in morality. As Rony (ibid., p. 27) explains, since modernity could not but be thought of as a reflection of ‘civilised’ Western societies, ‘territorial state, monogamous family and private property’ became the standard against which to assess others’ morality. Conversely, primitive societies could not but be ‘nomadic, ordered by blood ties, sexually promiscuous and communist’ (ibid.) As I taught about anthropologists’ stadial ordering of cultural forms into polygamy and monogamy, two insights struck me at once with the strength of a revelation. Firstly, the scientific and aesthetic knowledge that was systematically amassed through colonialism had to be approached as the archive that still informs how non-white and Indigenous subjects are represented via tropes as insidious as the wrapping of an island in mist. Secondly, whereas the aforesaid knowledge formations have subordinated non-white and Indigenous subjects by means of association with women (McClintock, 1995, p. 56), it is through sexuality that they have dispossessed them of humanity and/or sovereignty. Put more simply, non-white and Indigenous subjects have not been just feminised, rather they have been rendered queer.