Comparisons Worth Making: Queer Studies and Comparative Literature

Comparative literature and queer studies have more in common than one might think. Under the influence of theory and postcolonial studies, both fields have vigorously interrogated major concepts around which their disciplines revolve: "the nation," "the body," "literature," "community," "truth," "history," "space," "time," and so on. Rather than undermine their own premises, both develop great theoretical and methodological sophistication through such critical work, simultaneously sharpening and widening their gaze to investigate complex teleological, hegemonic narratives of history, bodies, and space from increasingly transnational, global perspectives. It is high time, then, to recognize the rich intersections between their theories, methods, and objects of interest. Along comes Comparatively Queer, an impressive collection of nine original essays, paired with the editors' introduction and an afterword by Valerie Traub that provide a useful overall theoretical framework. While feminist comparative literature approaches are well established and several interdisciplinary anthologies on queer globalization and queer diaspora exist already, Comparatively Queer is the first critical collection explicitly dedicated to the nexus of queer studies and comparative literature.

The fundamental question is how to gauge the stakes of such a meeting: how to compare when there are admittedly no stable categories of comparison, and when and why such comparisons are actually worth making. What new interdisciplinary methods and insights can a new comparative queer studies yield, the editors ask, especially those "beginning at [the] nexus of postcolonial and queer" (3) that focus explicitly on the "in-betweens" of representation: crossings of, and breaches in, narratives of temporality, history, the nation, and literature itself? Comparatively Queer's ambition is to simultaneously queer comparative literature and introduce more comparative methods into queer studies, hence queering the concept of comparison in both fields with an eye to "strengthening their interdisciplinary potential" (2). Fortunately, this potential is richly apparent in the nine essays, all of which are very much worth reading.

Somewhat puzzlingly arranged in two separate parts titled "Crossing Time" and "Crossing Cultures" (given the editors' own argument for the intersectionality of time and culture), the essays are spread over a plethora of literary periods and geopolitical contexts. In part 1, the chapters range from medieval European vernaculars (Kofi Campbell) to Anjali Arondekar's analysis of sexual and legal historical revisionism in debates about the recently repealed Indian Penal Code's antisodomy section. Arondekar asks how such reductive, ideological revisionism can best be queered locally to resist the stabilization of false sexual histories, while Campbell's linguistic analysis revises an arguably too narrowly focused historical narrative of queers' presence in Western mainstream language and literature. Moving on to nonhuman tropes of queerness in early modern culture, Carla Freccero traces the figure of the devouring dog and its problematic racial and sexual significations from fifteenth-century imperialist New World discourse to fascist-inflected prison writings, to media representations of the recent Diane Whipple case (a dog-mauling incident that killed a San Francisco lesbian). In a fascinating chapter on lesbian representation around 1600, Susan S. Lanser provocatively recasts "sapphism" as a central, intrinsic signifier of modernity around 1600 (71), arguing that sapphism's representational rise effectively sexualized history (72). Francesca Canadé Sautman's essay on European and US fairs from 1870 to 1930 studies sideshow, circus, and carnival performers (such as the bearded woman) and shows that many successfully carved-out spaces of freedom "filled with the queer possible" (109), resisting their easy classification as abject victims of heteronormative, able-bodied objectification.

In part 2, the remaining four chapters are less historically mobile but swiftly "move across and between cultural, national, and sexual borders" (7). Marie-Paule Ha's provocative article challenges Western queer gender theory by demonstrating that Hong Kong's different, hybrid ideas about gender call for more heterogeneous, comparative, context-specific theories that account for the formative influence of not one but two body schemas, Western biomedicine and Chinese cosmology. Even within the supposedly homogeneous Western context itself, understudied internal nuances call for close comparative attention, as Thomas...