Geopolitics Alert!

What a scribble, these questions on your sheet:
Do you also spin the threads of nations?

—Agha Shahid Ali, "A Fate's Brief Memoir"

For the past two years I have worked with a dynamic group of interdisciplinary and transnational feminist scholars on a collaborative project whose working title is "Feminisms, Geopolitics, and Sexuality." Central to our critical and political project is the understanding that the intersectionality of gender and sexuality is not only crucial to but a function of geopolitical formations. Through this project my colleagues and I are attempting to thicken current analyses of geopolitics, variously understood through rubrics such as transnational, international, global, and diasporic, to argue for an epistemological and activist conversation that places discourses of sexuality alongside locations of social struggles and state formations. While the project was conceptualized prior to the events of September 11, 2001, its current formulations clearly reflect on and engage with feminist implications of the ongoing war against "terrorism." Our continued desire has been to foreground feminist analyses of sociohistorical, cultural, and geopolitical conditions to make visible alternative strategies of intervention derived from alternative conceptualizations of problems for which violence is now considered a necessary solution. The participants in this project come from South Asian, Pacific Rim, and Southeast Asian studies, African legal and cultural studies, and Latin American anthropology. The questions we ask include the following: What new knowledges of genders and sexualities are being forged within differing interpretive communities in our contemporary climate? What are the links between colonial models of area-studies scholarship and the new global order, including the patterns of under- and overattention that privilege Arab countries and yet ignore Africa? What epistemological concerns emerge from the production of research practices and policy agendas around the study of gender and sexuality dynamics in Central Asian contexts?¹

I begin with an invocation of this project because its critical energies and struggles articulate, for me, some of the key debates and lacunae in current theorizations of gender and sexuality. The aim of my brief meditation here is to propose that we vigilantly interrogate the labor of geopolitics in the study of gender and sexuality. Such an exercise will go beyond the familiar rehearsal of dilemmas around incommensurability, cross-cultural comparison, translation, and the impossibilities of understanding and will take seriously the genealogical peculiarities that the recent turn to geopolitics brings. Just as critics such as Rachel Lee and Minoo Moallem have powerfully argued that the project of "women of color" and/or race has emerged as a pedagogical and intellectual corrective to the flawed past of women's studies, I want to argue that the project of geopolitics in all its avatars has emerged to play a similarly redemptive role in the new formations of queer scholarship.² My goal here is not to equate the overinvestment of women's studies in the project of women of color with queer scholarship's overinvestment in the discourse of geopolitics, but to foreground patterns of epistemological recuperation and redemption in two related sites of intellectual exploration.³

More precisely, what I want to suggest is that the current representational field of geopolitics, its complications notwithstanding, functions as a vexed, theoretical antidote to earlier models of a flawed, colonial geography of perversions. Such models, largely derivative of discourses of colonial anthropology, literature, sexology, and law, have been powerfully debunked and reassessed by scholars of colonialism(s) such as Ann Stoler, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Anne McClintock. We have also seen a concurrent outpouring of rich scholarship on "queer globalization," cross-cultural ethnographies of sexual cultures in a vast range of non-U.S. sites, all of which have troubled the portability of gender and sexuality as stable analytic registers across geopolitical sites.⁴ This new scholarship certainly attempts to avoid the facile additive approach of piling differentiated sexual minorities from different regions onto its analysis as a gesture of its transnational approach. However, even as new versions of relationalities in, between, and...