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Queer
Diaspora: What’s Queer About the (Queer) Future?
Zoran
Pecic
School
of English,
University
of Wales, Bangor,
Reino
Unido
A proposal for Beyond
Boundaries: An Interdisciplinary Conference Acquiring a
wide currency in the 1990s as a term designating
non-normative practices and identity formations, queer
theory, drawing heavily on French poststructuralism and
deconstruction as a method of literary and social critique,
challenged not only the dominant knowledges and social
hierarchies of heteronormativity but also the sexual
homogeneity of earlier feminist critique. Nearly two
decades after its first appearance in academia, queer
theory is still a popular term, not only in the various
university departments but also in popular culture.
Nevertheless, acknowledging the impact and efficacy of
queer theory, this paper poses the question: where do we
go from here?
Taking its cue from David
L. Eng, Judith Halberstam and Jose Esteban Muños’s call
for renewed, intersectional queer studies, this paper
advocates the necessity for queer studies to open up its
boundaries, render itself porous, and broaden the field
beyond the borders of Euro-Americanism. How are we to
employ this renewed queer theory? How do we open it and
towards what?
In this historical moment
of globalisation and mass movement across the globe, we
are faced with a transnational and postcolonial world
where movement and sexuality play an ever-important role
in the propagation of theoretical discourses on (queer)
sexuality. Notions of nationhood and belonging are not
distant from the issues of gender and sexuality. In fact,
they have never been so closely linked. This paper argues
that we need to frame queer theory diasporically in order
to collapse the self-centricity of European and American
definition of what constitutes queer sexuality and culture.
Diasporised queer theory,
this paper argues, exhibits the ability to interrogate the
power structures that operate within the ‘community’
and, at the same time, unearth the tendencies to obscure
the racial, ethnic, class and gender-based power relations
within and between the diasporised communities. Certainly,
the export and imposition of Western sexual and cultural
paradigms on the side of the non-West poses a few
questions about the structures of imperialism and
neo-colonialism in shaping the ways queer subjects
negotiate their sexual identity.
The notion that queerness
and queer visibility is solely a Western import, an alien
and unknown concept in other parts of the world, is one of
the contested areas where queer diaspora comes into play.
Transgressing reading practices and uncovering other sites
of belonging both within and outside the borders of
Euro-Americanism facilitates a transnational flow of
images and desires which destabilises the cultural
imperialism of queer theory.
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