Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

271 Pages·2002·6.67 MB·English

by  Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé

Queer Globalizations
Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism
Edited by
ARNALDO CRUZ-MALAVÉ AND
MARTIN F. MANALANSAN IV
n
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
© 2002 by New York University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Queer globalizations : citizenship and the afterlife of colonialism /
edited by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8147-1624-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8147-1623-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Homosexuality. 2. Globalization. 3. Human rights.
I. Cruz, Arnaldo. II. Manalansan, Martin F., 1960-
HQ75.15 .Q45 2002
306.76'6—dc21 2002004611
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 32
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Dissident Sexualities/Alternative Globalisms 1
Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV
PART 1: GLOBALIZATION AND DISSIDENT SEXUALITIES
1 The Wily Homosexual (First—and Necessarily Hasty—Notes) 13
Silviano Santiago
2 Dissident Globalizations, Emancipatory Methods, Social-Erotics 20
Chela Sandoval
3 "There Are No Lesbians Here": Lesbianisms, Feminisms, and Global
Gay Formations 33
Katie King
PART 2: QUEER VALUES IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY
4 Can Homosexuals End Western Civilization As We Know It? Family Values
in a Global Economy 49
Janet R. Jakobsen
5 Family Affairs: The Discourse of Global/Localization 71
Miranda Joseph
6 Redecorating the International Economy: Keynes, Grant, and the Queering
of Bretton Woods 100
Bill Maurer
7 Consuming Lifestyle: Commodity Capitalism and Transformations in
Gay Identity 134
Ann Pellegrini
v
CONTENTS
PART 3: DIASPORIC QUEER IDENTITIES
8 Local Sites/Global Contexts: The Transnational Trajectories of Deepa
Mehta's Fire 149
Gayatri Gopinath
9 Dancing La Vida Loca: The Queer Nuyorican Performances of Arthur Avilés
and Elizabeth Marrero 162
Lawrence M. La Fountain-Stokes
10 Syncretic Religion and Dissident Sexualities 176
Roberto Strongman
PART 4: THE NATION AS GLOBAL BORDER
11 Stealth Bombers of Desire: The Globalization of "Alterity" in Emerging
Democracies 195
Cindy Patton
12 "Strangers on a Train": Sexual Citizenship and the Politics of Public
Transportation in Apartheid Cape Town 219
William L. Leap
13 Like Blood for Chocolate, Like Queers for Vampires: Border and Global
Consumption in Rodriguez, Tarantino, Arau, Esquivel, and Troyano
(Notes on Baroque, Camp, Kitsch, and Hybridization) 236
Joseba Gabilondo
About the Contributors 265
About the Editors 269
Index 271
vi
Acknowledgments
To edit an anthology is to open yourself up to the words and worlds of experience of
others, all the more so if the anthology is about the possibilities of queer collabora-
tion and cross-cultural engagement globally. As cochairs of the "Queer Globaliza-
tion, Local Homosexualities: Citizenship, Sexuality, and the Afterlife of Colonialism7'
conference, sponsored by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies of the City Uni-
versity of New York's Graduate Center in the spring of 1998, in which many of the
essays in this volume were originally presented, we had the good fortune of collabo-
rating with some of the most creative and incisive scholars writing today in the field
of queer studies, the conference's planning committee: Gayatri Gopinath, Miranda
Joseph, Oscar Montero, José Esteban Muñoz, Geeta Patel, Ann Pellegrini, Chandan
Reddy, and Alan Yang. We were also fortunate to count on the dedication, resource-
fulness, and intelligence of Heidi Coleman and Jay Plum, the conference's coordina-
tors, and Jill Dolan, CLAGS's executive director at the time. As executive director, Jill
ushered in for CLAGS a period of growth in community involvement and exciting
scholarly projects, such as the series of Rockefeller-sponsored national events on the
theme of "Citizenship and Sexualities: Transcultural Constructions," which our con-
ference inaugurated. She was in many ways our guiding spirit, and she remains an
inspiration for us of the kind of engaged intellectualism that CLAGS represents.
We would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Rockefeller Foun-
dation, which was the primary sponsor of the conference, as well as the Michael
C. P. Ryan estate, whose additional support made the conference possible.
We wish to thank the CLAGS series editors, José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pel-
legrini, and our NYU Press editor, Eric Zinner, and his assistant, Emily Park, for
their commitment and belief in the project.
Finally, we would also like to thank the people without whose love and friend-
ship this project would not have been completed. For Martin: Dacal a salamat to
my comrades: Deb Amory, Rick Bonus, Javid Syed, Jack Guza, Gerry Cuachon for
their support during this period. And to my family, who still wonders about the
"books" that I am writing and why I am still not rich and famous. Despite their
bafflement, I know there is unconditional love. For Arnaldo: besos y abrazos siem-
pre to my partner and lover Greg de Silva, for the diasporic routes of affection that
have brought us, and kept us, together.
vii
Queer Globalizations
Introduction
Dissident Sexualities/Alternative Globalisms
Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin F. Manalansan IV
Queerness is now global. Whether in advertising, film, performance art, the In-
ternet, or the political discourses of human rights in emerging democracies, im-
ages of queer sexualities and cultures now circulate around the globe. Representa-
tions of queer lives and desires in such mainstream Hollywood films as Philadel-
phia, 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 pas-
sions 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 mar-
ketplace 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
ARNALDO CRUZ-MALAVE AND MARTIN F. MANALANSAN IV
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 stud-
ies 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 posi-
tively by nation-states in order to project an image of global modernness consis-
tent 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 di-
asporic 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 to-
gether 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 pan-
demic around the world.
Globalization, then—despite its tendency to reduce the social and political sig-
nificance 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, Sex-
uality, 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,
2
-INTRODUCTION
Canada, and queer diasporas. To a record-breaking audience, the speakers dis-
cussed the economic and cultural transformations brought on by global capital
around the world and attempted to identify both opportunities and perils inher-
ent in these transformations and their implication for queer cultures and lives. Yet
nowhere were the perils of our present global condition more clearly signified
than in a rather pregnant moment during the closing plenary of the conference.
In the question and answer period, a well-meaning U.S. queer scholar of note
stood up and narrated a vignette, a cautionary tale of sorts that urgently de-
manded a reply. He and a colleague had been strolling through the recently
cleaned-up and renovated Bryant Park, across the street from what was then home
to CUNY's Graduate Center, the site of the conference, when they were accosted
by an ostensibly Latino man distributing literature about the liberating powers of
Jesus Christ. Self-possessed, the white scholar answered the Latino man that he
and his friend were in fact gay and had no need for this literature. To the baffle-
ment of the scholar, the Latino man replied that he had also been gay once until
he had found the Lord. Now turning pointedly to the plenary speakers, the
scholar demanded in earnest, How should I have spoken to this Latino man? How
could I have made myself understood by him? How could "we" at this conference,
well-meaning queer scholars like him, he seemed to imply, communicate effec-
tively with this Latino (formerly gay) man?
At this point the three-day conference, which had progressed smoothly, came
to a screeching halt. Our speakers had finally been stumped by one of the op-
portunities and perils of our present global condition: the complexity of con-
temporary cross-cultural interactions in our globalized world. They had finally
been silenced by the white scholar's attempt to regain his sense of self-posses-
sion by wielding, in a destabilized, fluctuating world, what he thought of as a
stable identificatory term (gay)—an attempt that faltered because the ostensibly
Latino man (no longer the mythical "other" before the shining glass beads of
European culture) could wield the same term (gay) with equal authority and
impunity.
In order to break the silence, the speakers could have redirected at this point
the white scholar's question, forcing him (as Silviano Santiago, the Brazilian nov-
elist, recommends queer scholars to do in his brief and incisive essay in the pres-
ent volume) to engage with his own presuppositions. In a room full of queers of
color, we could have asked him not to presume that we were included in his well-
meaning "we." We could have reminded him, that is, that the "other" was already
in the room, and that the tendency to figure racial or ethnic difference as imper-
3
ARNALDO CRUZ-MALAVE AND MARTIN F. MANALANSAN IV
meable alterity was not so much a symptom of the other's radical difference as of
its unsettling proximity.
This anthology on queer globalizations is our insistent attempt not to answer
the white scholar's query, deflecting thus his colonizing gaze. It is our ethical re-
fusal to provide a grammar that could make the complexity and density of the
cross-cultural interactions generated by our present global condition immediately
transparent and universally legible. It is our refusal to fix the term "gay," and the
powerful legacies of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movements, as a
prerequisite for global interaction and coalition. For it is in the permutations of
this term and its legacies, as they circulate around the globe, in queer organiza-
tions and gatherings, from Mexico City's Semana Cultural Lesbico-Gay to New
Delhi's Campaign for Lesbian Rights and Beijing's International Women's Confer-
ence, from Buenos Aires's Marcha de Orgullo Gay to the diasporic South Asian and
Latino Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade in Queens, New York, that the future of the
human and civil rights of queers also lies.
Instead of providing a term or a grammar that would dispel the complexity of
these cross-cultural interactions, making them universally legible, the contribu-
tors to this anthology would rather open them up, and interrupt and interrogate
the hegemonic logics and moves that would prematurely solve them, reducing
their meaning and their political potential. They would rather develop a situated
knowledge of the ways global capital has routed queer cultures and lives, in the
hope that these queer itineraries may also yield counterhegemonic routes that can
redeploy and redirect global capital's mass dispersions, and pain, toward global
cross-cultural engagements and coalitions that are more respectful of queer cul-
tures and lives.1
The essays in this collection bring together scholars of globalization and queer
studies in order to examine from multiple perspectives the narratives that have
sought to define globalization. In examining the tales that have been spun about
globalization, these scholars have tried not only to assess the validity of the claims
made for globalization, they have also attempted to identify the tactics and
rhetorical strategies through which these claims and through which global circu-
lation are constructed and operate. On the one hand, as the essays in this collec-
tion show, narratives about globalization argue for "a transformation in the or-
ganization of capitalism, from [Fordist] mass production, which required and pro-
duced conformity, to ... 'flexible specialization/" which promotes niche markets
and local and regional interests, in sum, heterogeneity and diversity.2 On the
other hand, this newly liberated heterogeneity is directed, indeed managed and
4