Queer World: The possibilities for queer culture in a global age
Queer World: The possibilities for queer culture in a global age
By Sean Chou
How do you invent a “homosexual”?
‘Coming-out’ is the Euro-American paradigm which frames how homosexual identity is constructed in the West. It usually involves the homosexual subject confiding in close friends and family, casting themselves as the ‘gay’ or ‘queer’. But with this revelation come the ambiguous logics of guilt and shame. These are challenging because – while the homosexual subject optimistically hopes to regain self- confidence and agency by revealing their sexuality – by participating in the ‘coming-out’, they confess the secret of their same-sex attraction. An act of ‘revelation’ is also an act of ‘confession’. The power of the ‘gay’ label becomes essentialized and fixed.
Something striking about the coming-out is the sexual binary. ‘Gayness’ assumes a counter-balancing ‘straightness’. The coming-out becomes a self-reinforcing control mechanism that classifies and regulates individuals and whose bodies they choose to desire and share with.
In ‘History of Sexuality Vol 1’ (1998), Michel Foucault contends the self-confession is a ‘ritual of discourse’ which produces sexuality as a ‘truth-effect’; it lends power to social forces which go on to ‘judge, order, forgive, console, reconcile’ (61-62). But how do we move forwards with this discussion and think more broadly about how sexuality is constructed, not within a specific Western, modern context, but in other cultures and societies?
This article will be made up of three parts. We will begin with a consideration of how the illusion of the public/private binary links with socioeconomic relations. This will feed into a discussion of queer desire in an age of globalisation. This will beg the question: Should theories of globalization have a keener focus on subjective agency, rather than favouring theories of mass flow?
In this article, I use the term ‘queer’ to indicate non-heterosexual, non- binary conforming gender and sexual identities. The point is not to homogenise these identities or ‘lump them together’, but to indicate the subversiveness, possibility and open-endedness of the queer experience, which leads beyond the necessity of being a card-carrying ‘this-or-that’. The ‘coming-out’ paradigm, contains the Western logic of the public/ private dichotomy, where public life should be kept separate from private sexual freedoms. The export of this essentializing paradigm to non-Western places can complicate pre-existing queer discourses. For example, the work Silviano Santiago (2002) discusses the coming-out in Brazil. In the 1960s and 1970s, the verb ‘assumir’ (which means the equivalent of ‘to come out’ in English) spread widely to describe the homosexual public identity the person would take on after coming out. Santiago argues this meant homosexuals had to act as ‘marginal to the social norm’ – which ruled out bisexuality as a possible, normalised sexual preference, and reinforced the secretive nature of being homosexual, hidden from family life (2002: 15).
Santiago goes further to explain how the coming-out is wound up with class logics of exclusion and marginality, as it reinforces the divide between the bourgeois, property-owning class and poor neighbourhoods which do not have the bourgeois concept of ‘privacy’. Instead, Santiago explores how they revert to alternative social relations not based on a clash of norms (16). In one case, he describes a boy who stays in the tenement but dresses in drag at the carnival in the city, his activities supported by the washerwomen in the tenement who treat him like a person of the same sex. Santiago goes on to criticise coming- out as constructing ‘guilt’ in the homosexual subject (18). By aligning the homosexual person with behaviour perceived as gay, it reinforces them as socially ‘other’. Instead, Santiago argues it is more subversive to adopt subtler forms of queer subjectivity – to avoid perpetuating the same logics of exclusion imposed by homophobic opponents.
From this, it is evident sexuality interacts with social factors like class, and we should be aware of how it reinforces existing social inequalities and bourgeois ideological beliefs. We also observe how sexuality does not act solely on an individual level, but acts on a set of social relations, negotiating power dynamics and distribution of wealth.
But how do sexual politics impact the positionality of nationhood more generally?
In Cindy Patton’s case study of Taiwan, Patton discusses how, after 1993, gay men were allowed to serve in the military (2002). Patton argues this allowed Taiwan to position itself as modern, liberal and progressive, in contrast to neighbouring mainland China where homosexual activities were illegal at the time. He argues that the military policy harmed the existing gay rights movement in Taiwan because it ‘pre-empted liberation politics’ and gay men who did not serve in the military were now accused of being unpatriotic (2002: 195).
It is easy to make comparisons with the recent legalisation of gay marriage in Taiwan in May 2019. While it was a significant milestone for Taiwan as the first country in East Asia to pass equal marriage, we should not forget that the move helps Taiwan to position itself in an international context as a liberal, progressive country, amenable to Western freedoms and economic investment.
Patton argues that the public/private divide does not exist in Taiwan like in the US, where gay rights arose after decline in private, family structures (208). Instead of the civil rights ‘affectivity’ of a minority group, which borrowed strategies used to fight for civil rights for African-Americans in the 1960s, in Taiwan human rights – including gay rights – were ‘feminised’ because feminist movements saw gay people forming part of ‘dissent’ against family traditions like gender roles (206-7).
Liberal universalism assumes human rights are part of an inevitable, historical trajectory of progress and endow individual agents with innate dignity. Rather, as the example of Taiwan demonstrates, gay rights can be seen as part of a state’s nation-building project – and become complicit in hegemonic discourses of assimilation into normative constructs like citizenship and service to the state. Patton says at greater stake is the idea of the ‘Nation’ itself, and presumably its defence against forms of cultural identification like sexuality which transcend borders (202); the Nation has a greater prerogative to defend itself, and will ‘absorb’ social groups like gay people to achieve this.
Patton’s essay takes for granted the imposition of nation-state logics, seen as Western and modernising, as universal and inevitable, as part of a ‘performative homologism’ where nations fight over and leave no territories unclaimed (201). But the globalisation of queer discourses should not be seen as so uni-directional. Tom Boellstorff argues against the theory of globalisation as ‘flow’, arguing that it imposes Western queer terminology onto non-Western countries, and reinforces assumptions of Western cultural hegemony as inevitable (2003: 226).
Rather, he argues for his theory of ‘dubbing’ culture. Boellstorff observes ‘gay’ and ‘lesbi’ Indonesian subjectivities which he argues are separate from Western categories of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’.
Instead, the concept of the ‘dub’ describes how there are two sets of cultural logics. Western queer subjectivities are communicated through mainstream media like TV shows, and Indonesian ‘gay’ and ‘lesbi’ subjectivities. These are national, rather than local or ethnic: in one case, a ‘gay’ man called Hasan first discovered ‘gay’ people through the TV broadcast of a gay demonstration in Indonesia (226-227).
But subjectivities cross between local, global and personal meanings invested into them. The term ‘dub’ encapsulates these contradictions, how terms cannot ultimately reconcile the meanings of sexual subjectivities into a closed totality, but are interpretative, intersubjective and endlessly played upon through multiple discourses.
To return to the coming-out, perhaps an alternative analogy should be used for how queer-ness is constructed. Queerness isn’t a ‘coming-out’ - the onus on queer people to come out interpolates and subordinates us to a social order we didn’t create. It perpetuates forms of domination and pre-existing inequalities.
But equally, the closet – the coming-out space – should be reclaimed if we can explore meaningful forms of resistance to heteronormativity. The closet is an inherently performative space, and suggests equally that heterosexuality is performed and ironically a ‘phase’ in many gay people’s lives before they come out as ‘gay’. This reveals the fluid, inherently unstable labels used for sexual identification. But also, how we can understand the public/private dichotomy as ideological, as it perpetuates bourgeois, property-owning logics of public subordination and private domination.
These broad theoretical postulations should not disguise how hetero- doxical thinking spreads unevenly in different cultural contexts. Rather, we should stay sensitive to how alternative, queer identities are constructed ‘on the ground’ – as a nation building project in Taiwan, or distinctly nation-bound categories in Indonesia which are parallel but do not blend with Western, totalising identities.
If we grasp the alterity, potentiality and becoming futurity of queerness, perhaps we learn everything in the world is a bit queer – and better for the diverse, opening subjectivities it promises.
References
Boellstorff, T. (2003). Dubbing culture: Indonesian gay and lesbi subjectivities and eth- nography in an already globalized world. American Ethnologist, 30(2), pp. 225-242.
Cruz, A. Manalansan, M. (2002). Introduction. In: A. Cruz, M. Manalansan, ed., Queer globalizations: citizenship and the afterlife of colonialism, 1st ed. New York: New York University Press., pp. 1-10.
Foucault, M. (1998). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. London: Penguin Books.
Patton, C. (2002). Stealth Bombers of Desire: The Globalization of “Alterity” in Emerging Democracies. In: A. Cruz, M. Manalansan, ed., Queer globalizations: citizenship and the afterlife of colonialism, 1st ed. New York: New York University Press., pp. 195-219.
Santiago, S. (2002). The Wily Homosexual. In: A. Cruz, M. Manalansan, ed., Queer globalizations: citizenship and the afterlife of colonialism, 1st ed. New York: New York University Press., pp. 13-20.