Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

Introduction: Dissident Sexualities/Alternative Globalisms

Introduction Dissident Sexualities/Alternative Globalisms Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV Queerness is now global. Whether in advertising, film, performance art, the Internet , or the political discourses of human rights in emerging democracies, images of queer sexualities and cultures now circulate around the globe. Representations of queer lives and desires in such mainstream Hollywood films as Philadelphia , To Wong Foo, and Go Fish, and in the more arty international productions, the British The Crying Game, the Cuban Strawberry and Chocolate, and the Indian Fire, it is true, sell increasingly well as global commodities to “general audiences.” And gay and lesbian lifestyle products, from pink triangles to rainbow flags to the Carlos and Billy dolls and gay.com cruises, are more frequently bought as identity markers by queers around the globe. In a world where what used to be considered the “private” is ever more commodified and marketed, queerness has become both an object of consumption, an object in which nonqueers invest their passions and purchasing power, and an object through which queers constitute their identities in our contemporary consumer-oriented globalized world. But the increased global visibility of queer sexualities and cultures in the marketplace has also generated multiple opportunities for queer political intervention through an equally globalized coalition politics. Interestingly, as the “private” is ever more commodified and the body is more and more targeted as a site of global 1 consumption, queer sexualities and cultures have come to occupy center stage in some of the most urgently disputed issues of our times. As the essays collected in this volume and scholarship in the growing fields of queer and globalization studies attest, queer sexualities and cultures have often been deployed negatively to allay anxieties about “authentic” national belonging in our massively migratory contemporary world (see, for example, Gayatri Gopinath’s lucid analysis of the transnational circulation of the Indian queer film Fire, in this volume) and positively by nation-states in order to project an image of global modernness consistent with capitalist market exchange (see Cindy Patton’s illuminating discussion of Taiwan’s adoption of a human rights policy inclusive of gay men, also in this volume). And yet this position occupied by queer sexualities and cultures in our globalized world as a mediating figure between the nation and diaspora, home and the state, the local and the global, as argued most cogently here by Janet Jakobsen and Miranda Joseph, has not only been a site of dispossession, it has also been a creative site for queer agency and empowerment. It has also provided diasporic queers, for example, the opportunity to connect with other queers and sexuality and gender activists at “home” in order to interrogate the limits both of nationalist discourses and of modern Euro-American lesbian and gay narratives of identity. It has compelled queer activists, feminists, and legal scholars to come together cross-nationally in order to confront the violations of the human rights of queers around the globe in organizations such as ILGA (International Lesbian and Gay Association) and IGLHRC (International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission). And it has made absolutely indispensable the formation of global coalitions in order to address policies whose presuppositions about sexuality and gender only expand and unequally promote the devastation of the AIDS pandemic around the world. Globalization, then—despite its tendency to reduce the social and political significance of queer sexualities and cultures to a commodity exchangeable in the marketplace—has also provided the struggle for queer rights with an expanded terrain for intervention. In recognition of the promise—and perils—afforded by this new terrain, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) sponsored in the spring of 1998 a conference titled “Queer Globalization, Local Homosexualities: Citizenship, Sexuality , and the Afterlife of Colonialism,” from which most of the essays in the present volume have been culled. CLAGS’s conference on queer globalizations drew a wide array of queer activists and scholars specializing in Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, the United States, ARNALDO CRUZ-MALAVÉ AND MARTIN F. MANALANSAN IV 2 Canada, and queer diasporas. To a record-breaking audience, the speakers discussed the economic and cultural transformations brought on by global capital around the world and attempted to identify both opportunities and perils inherent in these transformations and their implication for queer cultures and lives. Yet nowhere were the perils of...