Queer Cities, Queer Cultures : Europe since 1945 (original) (raw)
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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.
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Starting from a fishbowl discussion, which has taken place at the conference, this paper discusses what can be gained from thinking across genderqueer theories and anthropological Europeanization research. It argues that thinking queerly includes a skepticism toward identitarian and normative understandings of Europe, as well as an ethnographic attention being paid to that which emerges in the gaps and cracks of Europeanization. The ways in which institutions working in the name of Europe generate heterogeneous experiences resulting in unequal and differentially distributed, multiple Europes are also key. »Queering Europe« oscillates between an emphasis on the central role of the sexual and the gendered in imaginations of Europe and destabilizing notions of Europe in a more general sense; as such, it is closely related to post-/decolonial approaches. This analytical move has three dimensions to it: First, queering Europe aims at deconstructing hegemonic imaginaries of the continent. Second, it makes visible the pluralistic and fragmented nature of Europe(s) and the ambivalent and sometimes unforeseen consequences that processes of Europeanization are accompanied by. Third, queering Europe can be envisioned as a way of imagining and thinking about Europe through a »critical utopianism« (Mbembe 2019) that puts solidarity center stage. Ethnography informed by decolonial critiques as well as by proposals for queering methodologies constitutes our chosen epistemological tool regarding investigating queering Europe as a mode of knowledge production and political vision.
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(Re)Articulating Sexual Citizenship: Between Queering the Urban Space and Subjugating the Queer
In today’s post-industrial cities, how urban citizenship is defined and performed have been ambiguously positioned in their relationship with the urban societal space. While the cities become more commodified and privatized with the inter-urban competition, the concept of citizenship is put into a tentative position between being participatory political subjects and passive consumers. Sexuality, in this regard, raises up as an important element of political expressiveness and passivity, with its constructive role on the identity. The discussion on political economy of sexuality by Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler contributes to the study where the participatory role of sexual citizenship can be grounded on cultural and/or economic aspects of subjectivity, from their poststructuralist perspective. By using the discourse theory by Laclau and Mouffe as its method, the thesis explores the articulatory practices for the antagonistic construction of sexual citizenship through discourses of neoliberalism and its counterparts. An analysis on subject positions in a neoliberal era is defined with their participation in the urban as a consumptuary and/or political space. Therefore, this study analyses Stockholm Pride as a case to show how sexuality in the urban space is (de)politically (re)defined, and how an entrepreneurial agenda of a post-industrial city, Stockholm, discursively functions for positioning sexual citizens between the antagonisms of being a consumer or citizen.