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Reviewed by:
  • Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression ed. by Meredith L. Weiss, Michael J. Bosia
  • Joe Hatfield
Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression. Edited by Meredith L. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013; pp. ix + 267, $85.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.

With the rewards and promises of queer worldmaking comes the guarantee of challenges, especially when considering the implications of worldmaking internationally. Too often scholars and activists forget or ignore transnational considerations that complicate queer advocacy. Nevertheless, engaging cross-cultural voices and global queer contexts invites these complications toward new queer worldmaking futures in a world largely unaccommodating to those outside normative gender systems or sexuality continuums. Offering new insight into queer international relations, Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression, edited by Meredith L. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia, is a collection of essays addressing politically fueled forms of homophobia around the world. Written primarily by political scientists for those interested in trans-national queer rights, these essays address homophobia as not merely an ideological inclination of the individual but as a motivated transnational phenomenon embedded within particular political regimes. As globalization increasingly becomes a prominent topic for queer scholars and activists, this book is timely and valuable for those interested in homophobia outside their own national context. Thus, this book is ideal for the scholars, graduate students, advanced undergraduates or activists, and certain chapters would enrich a course on international affairs of any kind. Organized as a fluid volume with eleven unique essays that serve to support its overarching claim, this book places the complexities of the notion of “world” as central to the project of queer worldmaking.

The volume reveals the diverse range of homophobic politics occurring globally, from still ongoing deliberations concerning the “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda (Chapter 4 by Kapya J. Kaoma) to the lesser-known case of state-induced homophobia in Iran (Chapter 8 by Katarzyna Korycki and Abouzar Nasirzadeh), amongst various others. As such, this book advances the conversation of a developing area of scholarship on the opportunities and constraints of global queer politics. Queering across the globe is riddled with problems due to [End Page 166] intersectional questions of coloniality, race relations, and geopolitics that most Western queer theory does not address, a point emphasized by Mark Blasius in Chapter 10, “Theorizing the Politics of (Homo)Sexualities across Cultures.” Queer worldmakers should also be weary of, in any sense of the word, applying a queer theory that would homogenize a culture when considering queer populations on a global scale. Seemingly aware of this quandary, the volume’s authors resist making any formal interventions in the realm of queering, but rather, as the editors note, “seek to understand and explain political homophobia as a state strategy, social movement, and transnational phenomena, powerful enough to structure the experiences of sexual minorities and the expressions of sexuality” (2). Paramount to this book’s argument is a recognition that political homophobia is a “purposeful” method for the “scapegoating of an ‘other’ that drives the processes of state building and retrenchment; as the product of transnational influence peddling and alliances, and as integrated into questions of collective identity and the complicated legacies of coloniality” (2). From an interdisciplinary perspective, the authors of the essays that follow the introductory chapter conform to this thesis, but do not hesitate to vary in their approach throughout.

The major theoretical contributions of the volume appear in the opening two chapters and the conclusion, which detail the complexities of theorizing a state homophobia that could, as the editors explain, account for homophobia as manifested on the governmental, institutional level. Addressing queer politics internationally, Bosia’s own chapter, “Why States Act,” serves as the main theoretical intervention for properly attending to the delicate nature of global, inter-cultural forms of homophobia. Bosia initially highlights the identity politics of nation-imposed governances of homosexuality by demonstrating how notions of tradition and rhetorics of power can reconfigure the queer body according to the laws and customs of a particular country. “State homophobia,” as coined by Bosia, does not serve as the gatekeeper for any particular form of coloniality...

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