Queer Antinomies (original) (raw)
Related papers
The past decades have been ones of unprecedented sociocultural and legal gains for queer politics, including the decriminalization of antisodomy laws as well as the recognition of the human rights of sexual minorities internationally. But these achievements have been accompanied by a severe critique of queer racism, homonationalism and of the imperialist agenda of global gay politics. While supporting the critique of the complicities of Western queer politics in neoliberal, imperial discourses and condemning the instrumentalization of sexual freedom as a means to sanction and harass minorities in the West as well as to stigmatize entire populations in the global South as repressive and backward, the paper outlines the troubling state-phobia that plagues antihomonationalism politics. It is argued that the sole focus on queer racism and homonationalism in the global North makes it difficult to address homophobic and heteronormative practices and structures in diasporic communities and the postcolonial world. In contrast to limiting postcolonial queer critique to anti-homonationalism, the paper pleads for a more complex, multidirectional politics that is directed at coercive practices across the postcolonial divide. Thus, anti-imperialist and antiracist critique of queer politics must be accompanied by a critique of ‘reproductive heteronormativity’ within postcolonial contexts. The present essay is an attempt to negotiate these complex and troubling developments in the field of postcolonial-queer politics and addresses the dangers of queer state-phobia.
Between the Global/Glocal and the National: Intersectional Challenges to Queer Studies. V–VII
2011
Queer studies and the discussions within this field are international and the scholars are mobile. Still, it is important to keep in mind that a globalized world characterized by transnational trends is not homogeneous, not even within the so called Western cultural sphere. Local contexts are various and they are significant regarding both the organisation of research activity and the analysis that are made. The local context is particularly important when the interaction between research and society is highlighted. For example, in the customary genesis, the beginnings of queer theory are described as an outcome of an encounter between poststructuralist thinking and a radicalisation of activism that reacted against ever harsher attitudes in society during the AIDS crisis in the United States, a bit more than twenty years ago.
This essay reviews three books that center on the globalized city as a key site for unpacking disparate queer cultures. Two of the books discussed make an explicit effort to deterritorialize queer historiography outside the global North. They focus on the everyday experiences of postcolonial subjects in Cape Town and Hong Kong. In a moment of intensified counterterrorism, necropolitical nationalism, and resurgent yet covert forms of empire, both works have much to say about how the lives of sexual minorities are simultaneously affected by and resist Western imperialism. Thus they also enter into an already ongoing debate in contemporary queer studies that challenges the normalization of queer politics as a product of expanding capital both locally and abroad. All three books trace the shifting forms of the nation-state and how it affects the lived experiences of queer populations in the city. In the process, they collectively refuse the seemingly axiomatic notion that queer subjects are always being homogenized by transnational capital and neoliberal cosmopolitanism. Rather, as Andrew Tucker suggests, the hybrid queer cultures present in the city demand a more nuanced understanding of how these communities are shaped by historically, geographically, and politically specific national and cosmopolitan ideals.
Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations, edited by Laura J. Shepherd & Caitlin Hamilton, 2023
This chapter offers an introduction to the central themes, concepts and debates in queer theory. It explores three trajectories that queer studies has taken. First, it investigates the necessity of, and possibilities for, decolonising queer studies, focusing in particular on translation, conceptual innovation and alternative genealogies as decolonising strategies. Second, it illuminates a tradition of materialist analysis in queer studies while also demonstrating how the relationship between queer communities and capitalism is historically contingent and shifting. Third, it scales up concerns with race and class to the international level, demonstrating how queer politics matters to global politics. Not only are queer lives shaped by international structures and processes; these international dynamics might themselves be queer, haunted as they are by figurations of normality and perversion.
The Queer Political is Geopolitical
This month, major cities throughout the U.S. will hold annual gay pride events: parades followed by parties throughout the night and weekend. These kinds of celebrations -for rights (to marriage, for example) and especially for LGBT visibility -make up domestic claims to freedom. According to these rhetorics, by providing visible space and time for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people to take pride in their worlds, the U.S. is on the proper path toward civilizational progress. As such, gay pride, its ideological and cultural attachments to a certain kind of good life, should be contextualized within geopolitics.
Introduction to Special Issue: Queer Liberalisms and Marginal Mobilities
Special Issue: Queer Liberalisms and Marginal Mobilities, 2023
The aim of this special issue is to unpack the tenuous relationship between queer liberalisms and marginal mobilities within contested political contexts in the Global South and North. Establishing the special issue's thematic and theoretical framework, it firstly, theorizes "queer liberalism" as a mode of governance and a critique and contextualizes the term within a genealogy of queer politics. Secondly, it discusses "marginal mobilities" as an analytical framework that expands the purview of how the (im)mobilities of LGBTIQ+ people are co-constituted by queer liberal governance and approached within scholarly, activist, and political debates. This Introduction further charts this special issues' interdisciplinary contributions which address three overarching themes: (a) the paradox of queer neoliberal policies and politics in the LGBTIQ+ asylum context; (b) the in-and exclusions of nonheteronormative subjects and/within the nation-state; (c) the in-and exclusions of LGBTIQ+ refugees within societal spaces in the asylum country.
Antipode, 2002
This collection has been several years in the making and arose in large part as a result of my participation in the Lesbigay Caucus and (as co-chair, with Glen Elder) the Sexuality and Space Specialty Group (SSSG) of the Association of American Geographers (AAG). In these venues and as a discussant or participant in several SSSG-sponsored sessions in annual AAG meetings, I experienced palpable, gendered tensions amongst queer folk. My supportive co-chair and I tried to negotiate some of these tensions by devising bylaws for the SSSG that would help structurally to ensure gendered diversity in the leadership. In particular, we suggested that the chairship be permanently shared by two persons who occupied different "sexual subject positions." The motion was passed by the SSSG's membership and is now part of the nationally sanctioned SSSG's bylaws of the AAG. While technically the rule might result in two men or two women serving as co-chairs (the possibilities are many), it seemed likely at the very least that the stipulation would promote awareness of gender diversity issues.