Ground Zero

The ground zero of gender and sexuality studies has not dramatically shifted, its “area” unsurmised. Or, it has at least not been sufficiently undermined, just relativized with the qualifying brackets of West, Anglo-European, US, or something of the like. And then the work that those concepts are set to do continues on its merry global ways. “Gender, race, sexuality”—the categories roll off the tongue like dice, and though we might yet feel the bitter fates that have made them fighting words, we also know how they have been pressed into imperial service, fashioned into a set of cognitive procedures for dealing with those other realities as so many reflections of, so many varying distances from, this center’s own.

You think you already know that, but you do not. You tend to forget, if you really knew it at all. If you do not know it, it is because those other “areas” have these other brackets around them, which you call “context.” It makes you feel cosmopolitan about your ignorance and comfortable with the provinciality of your nonconformist, subversive imagination. You know your theoretical acts are local, even as you are aware of the global, but still you cannot seem to retain the fact that this is the place where the brackets are made and placed, the areas conceived and implemented, the global defined (for those areas to demonstrate, resist, or elaborate), which sets the stage for all those other indeterminate “differences” not encapsulated by the ones you know so well to persist in some inchoate form that you are likely to call “cultural.” Anthropology will surely take care of that. And everyone can keep their place.

Or, if you know all this and, more, you know (but do not readily “understand”) at least one of these other “contexts” intimately, where smells as much as words call up associations that, loath to leave the premises, will enmesh you, maybe tear somewhat at the “subject position” you have worked hard to build and win for yourself (rather than giving rise to those generic thoughts so transportable into “theoretical” reflections), still you might forget when you are looking through these analytical lenses—these nearly Kantian categories—that you are seeing only as far as these imperial shores will allow: the familiar forms of life that an “American grammar” of power and marginality, visibility and invisibility, identity and difference, normativity and nonnormativity, being and becoming can help you make out.

Eurocentrism is one thing. This is something else besides. Sure, there is the epistemological problem, the problem of reading, making sense of gender, race, and sexuality “in a global context.” In this endeavor, anti-Eurocentric, anticolonial critiques have not lost their pointed relevance, though now they too have brackets around them, like a third-string guest in a crowded party, nodded to in passing where there are more exciting conversations to be had with personages of field-making, field-troubling value (against which one would have to measure one’s own assets). “Moving on,” the academic shareholders say, as they make their way to the cutting edge with the highest profit margin.

Simply pointing this out might seem like you are going over to the other side of the culture wars, that side that wants to put an end to all this “identity” stuff, which has already rent the social fabric and its fundamental cultural values, a barbarism against which all manner of civilizational return is repeatedly proposed. They who, out of credence in Enlightenment humanist values or in post-Enlightenment, posthumanist theory, would underestimate the durable, even intensified salience of identity rationalities in the organization of contemporary statist practices do so in willful disregard of how this optic of abstract equivalence is a key function in today’s dominant social operating system. Or it could well play into that conservative strain of so-called historical materialists who, in a hysterical defense of their own hallowed ground of critique, would relegate the matters of concern propelling feminist, antiracist, and queer critique as of secondary importance to the primary, ultimately determining structures and forces of capitalism. In one fell swoop, such a...