The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power

11. Who’s Your Daddy? Queer Diasporic Framings of the Region

274 > 275 notion of the region into new realms. Cohn, in his essay “Regions Subjective and Objective,” was responding to the growing interest in studying India through the “region” on the part of South Asia scholars and issued the following caution: Regions, even the assumed enduring ones…are of a changing nature through time. Various kinds of circumstances can rapidly alter the boundaries and the very nature and conception of a region.…Regions are far from fixed, enduring things, especially if any historical perspective is taken. They are not absolutes and they are difficult, if not impossible , to define by objective criteria.1 Cohn warned against reifying the region at a time when the region was in fact being fixed within area studies scholarship in precisely the ways that he was cautioning against, instead urging the field of South Asian studies to recognize how the region is constituted through an interplay of spatial and temporal logics. In recent years we have seen a reanimation of the concept of the region along the lines of Cohn’s definition, one that stresses and in fact embraces the slipperiness of the term and that understands it as shifting and mobile, rather than as fixed or static. New articulations of the region have emerged most notably from area studies scholars interested in pushing against nation-centered models by insisting on the malleability of the concept. This renewed interest in thinking through the region points to dissatisfaction on the part of many area studies scholars with frameworks that continue to privilege either the nation or the global as primary units of analysis. They suggest that we cannot fully comprehend the local through a reference to its apparent Other, the global, but that there are indeed other spatial scales at work in producing the local. In other words, the region may encompass the local, but while the local is often posited as a fixed and stable entity, the region avoids this reification precisely due to its multivalent connotations. There is a plasticity to the term, in that it references both subnational and supranational formations simultaneously, which allows it to trouble both the global/local dyad and a dominant nationalist frame.2 The region thus emerges as a useful category in that it allows for a simultaneous consideration of the local, the national, the transnational, and the global. 276 > 277 Diasporic studies…have been criticized for recentring the analysis of cultural struggles on those subjects who migrated to the neglect of those…who remained in the home country.…While such analyses create alternative queer narratives within the global north, diasporic queer critiques of Western hegemony still pivot on the first world. Instead she asks, “Is there a way to make queer life in the complex modernities of the non-West, third world and global south itself the centre of transnational queer analysis?” She answers this question by calling for an increase in “empirical and situated studies of the many cross-border flows that provide conditions for queer life in the region,” which can provide an antidote to the continuing hegemony of EuroAmerican queer formations.5 This call for a new queer regional studies that centers the Global South is echoed by other anthropologists working on sexuality and Southeast Asia such as Mark Johnson, Peter Jackson, and Gil Herdt; these scholars use a regional perspective to trace the similarities and dissonances between gender and sexual formations in sites as disparate as Thailand and Indonesia.6 Critical regionality, for these scholars, makes multiple interventions. First, it challenges the Eurocentrism of dominant queer studies scholarship by focusing on alternative sexual and gendered logics that are not reducible to hegemonic Euro-American notions of gay identity. Second, it challenges area studies scholarship that remains overly nation-centric and that elides the function of transnational and diasporic flows as they remake even the most apparently “local” of sites. Finally, critical regionality challenges a theory of globalization that presumes homogeneity and that fails to adequately address how discourses of a “global gay identity” are transformed and negotiated within local sites. I place Niranjana’s work in conversation with the recent queer studies work on critical regionality as both are particularly compelling recent examples of how regional analyses can be used to foreground alternative solidarities and affiliations in the shadow of resurgent nationalisms, on the one hand, and globalization, on the other. Situating these texts in relation to one another also foregrounds...