Intra-Asian circuits and the problem of global queer

Abstract

This paper advances a regional approach to understanding gay, lesbian, GLTB, or queer sexualities in Asia. Debates about queer globalisations have largely rotated on the relation of non-Western to Western formulations of erotic identities: to what extent are queer subjectivities a Western export? As conversations about queer sexualities grapple with the global level, they have had difficulty avoiding the centrifugal powers of Western formulations, particularly those attached to the hegemonic force of United States. The dominant model for global queer subjectivities is an import-export framework: the assumption that legible queer sexualities derive from U.S. – infected Western modes of sexuality or from Western-based systems of modernity, such as capitalism. One version of the import-export model underpins homophobic nationalist discourses, which assert that Western imperialism produced Third World queers. An import-export logic also surfaces in well-meaning work in sexual rights, which, when it stresses the homophobia of third-world traditions, implies – or even asserts – that modernisation will make the non-Western world more liberated for queers. In this way, sexual rights reproduce a geopolitical progress narrative. Discussions about non-normative sexuality in the global south conflate Western, modern, and globalisation. Even when they are critical of Western dominance in the world, as is the case with nationalists and many sexual rights advocates, their interpretation recapitulates Western hegemony, by locating the origin and agency of modern queer life squarely in the West.