Queer Theory and Permanent War

Can queer theory be recognizable as such when it emerges from elsewhere? This is the central question that guides our thinking on the intersections between queer theory and area studies, in our case the study of the Middle East as transnational. We come to this question in thinking through disciplinary and archival locations of knowledge production, and the political, economic, and social cartographies that animate both queer theory and the study of the Middle East. Finally, we outline some of the recent theoretical contributions of work that thinks across the boundedness of “queer theory” and “Middle Eastern studies,” and revisit the question of what queer theory may look like when it is not routed through Euro-American histories, sexualities, locations, or bodies.

The United States remains foundational to queer theory and method, regardless of the location, area, archive, or geopolitical history. (This is still largely the case even in Europe, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.) US archives and methods appear to make legible and illegible all other geohistories. We note that this is not a new problematic.

Much of the early work of queer theory in the 1990s sought to trace the flows of “queer” as a hegemonic traveling formation that followed the circuits of US Empire. In attempting to mark the complex negotiations and resistances to such purported external impositions, the “local” in the global south was unwittingly reified as raw data, often through the purview of “sexuality studies,” in relation to an ever-entrenching “global.”

And yet, several decades later, despite many trenchant interventions, such epistemic issues remain. Commodifications of area, and of the local, result in a twofold movement. It is not just that queer theory is unconsciously enacting an area studies parochialization: queer theory as American studies. More trenchantly, other areas become visible and refracted only through this parochialization. Thus the formulation of this roundtable is notable. “Queer Theory and Area Studies” suggests that queer theory itself remains unmarked and unencumbered by location. (We could, in fact, rename this roundtable “American Studies and Area Studies,” or “Queer Theory as Area Studies.”) This may well be a problem hardly specific to queer theory and more generalizable in terms of the US academy as a hegemonic and traveling formation. After all, both authors of the present article were educated at the graduate level and now research and teach in the American academy—one is trained in or teaches area studies and anthropology, while the other is an “Americanist,” an invisibilized area studies formation from which all other area studies are derived and defined. Another example of this is the number of US women’s, gender, and sexuality studies departments that have now set up franchises in not only western European countries but also eastern and southern European as well as global south locations. This geopolitically uninflected variety of queer theorization, which does not recognize itself as redoubling homonationalist tendencies, also tends to be resistant to knowledge produced under the purview of an “area studies formation.” This is perhaps due partly to the fear of the area studies disciplinary mandate to situate, locate, and circumscribe, a mandate that might seem antithetical to the antifoundationalist impulses of queerness. Furthermore, rarely is the scholarship of queer theorists hailed as epitomizing the best potential of area studies formations. At the outset, the work of queer theorists in area studies (rarely read by queer theory as “Queer Theory” and often relegated to “sexuality studies”) is understood as a “case study” of specifics rather than an interruption of the canonical treatments of the area studies field at large.

While we are thoroughly convinced of the critique of area studies that transnational feminist theorizing instantiated more than three decades ago, and while we are critical of the (changing) conservative nature of the field (the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and the International Journal of Middle East Studies have been key to this change), we remain observant of certain aporias. The transnational frame, popular in contemporary queer theory and sexuality studies, is often routed through the west, resulting either in west to the rest or in theoretical and...