In the West, once apparently progressive causes such as sexual equality and lesbian and gay emancipation are increasingly redeployed in order to discipline and ostracize immigrant underclass subjects, primarily Muslims. Gender and sexuality on the one hand and race, culture, and/or ethnicity on the other are more and more forced into separate, mutually exclusive realms. That development cannot but bear on the establishment of queer and postcolonial studies as separate academic specializations, among whom relations usually are as cordial as they are indifferent. This volume inquires into the possibilities and limitations of a parceling out of objects alternative to the common scheme, crude but often apposite, in which Western sexual subjectivity is analyzed and criticized by queer theory, while postcolonial studies takes care of non-Western racial subjectivity. Sex, race: always already distinguished, yet never quite apart.
Roderick A. Ferguson has described liberal pluralism as an ideology of discreteness in that it disavows race, gender and sexuality's mutually formative role in political, social, and economic relations. It is in that spirit that this volume advocates the discreet, hence judicious and circumspect, reconsideration of the (in)discrete realities of race and sex. Contributors: Jeffrey Geiger, Merill Cole, Jonathan Mitchell and Michael O'Rourke, Jaap Kooijman, Beth Kramer, Maaike Bleeker, Rebecca Fine Romanow, Anikó Imre, Lindsey Green-Simms, Nishant Shahani, Ryan D. Fong, and Murat Aydemir
Murat Aydemir: Introduction: Indiscretions At the Sex/Culture Divide
Gay Holiday Cruises Jeffrey Geiger: Subaltern Looks and the Imperial Gaze: Charles Warren Stoddard’s
South Sea Idyls Merrill Cole: The Orient of Critique: Ambivalence about the East in Wilde and Gide
Jonathan Mitchell and Michael O’Rourke:
Quempire: A Loiterly Journey into
Heart of Darkness Jaap Kooijman: Pleasures of the Orient: Cadinot’s Maghreb as Gay Male Pornotopia
Rearticulations of Sex/Race Beth Kramer: The Double Nature of the Love Triangle: Sedgwick, Greene, Achebe
Maaike Bleeker: Of Passing and Other Cures: Arjan Ederveen’s
Born in the Wrong Body and the Cultural Construction of Essentialism
Rebecca Fine Romanow: The Refusal of Migrant Subjectivity: Queer Times and Spaces in Hanif Kureishi’s
The Buddha of Suburbia Murat Aydemir: Blood Brothers
Queer Nations Anikó Imre: Lesbian Representation and Postcolonial Allegory
Lindsey Green-Simms: “Just to See”: Fanon, National Consciousness and the Indiscreet Look in Post-Third Cinema
Nishant Shahani: What can Queer Theory Learn from Feminism in India?: Reversing Epistemological Frames
Ryan D. Fong: Weaving a Different Kind of Tartan: Musicality, Spectrality, and Kinship in Jackie Kay’s
Trumpet Contributors
Index