The Sociology of Sexualities: Queer and Beyond

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2013

For a discussion of the growing scholarship on transnational sexualities, see Bose forthcoming.

The analysis of global sexual economies has emerged not only as an important area of enquiry in its own right but also as part of a broader feminist agenda to re-map the conceptual and empirical terrain of the study of global capitalism. Yet 'few have explicitly addressed how heteronormativity itself underscores their own research conclusions about sexual consumption and identities [nor] the limiting nature of masculinities and femininities as inscribed in cultural and institutional practices [and] arrangements of intimacy' (Lind 2010a: 49). This chapter considers what it might mean to queer the study of global sexual economies and argues that it is not enough simply to add queer and stir to the study of commercial sex by including discussion of non-normative sexual identities and practices. Rather, it takes up the overarching theme of this edited collection to contend that we also need to do queer to (instead of just looking at what it means to be queer in) globalisation and capitalism by revealing and contesting the heteronormative gender logics that continue to frame scholarship on, and political debates about, global sexual economies. Yet, while commercial sex can itself be viewed as being ‘outside the (hetero)norm’ (Smith and Laing 2012: 517), it both subverts and (re)produces gendered, sexualised, racialised and classed power relations.

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2009

Since the early 1990s, many authors have identified the proliferation of new homosexual and transgender identities and cultures in both Western and non-Western societies as a significant instance of cultural globalization. In 1992 Ken Plummer wrote, "The gay and lesbian movements house identities, politics, cultures, markets, and intellectual programs which nowadays quite simply know no national boundaries. Homosexualities have become globalized." 2 Dennis Altman has labeled this phenomenon "global queering" and in a 1997 article, "Global Gaze/Global Gays," observed, "What strikes me is that within a given country, whether Indonesia or the United States, Thailand or Italy, the range of constructions of homosexuality is growing." 3 At the cusp of the new century, Peter Drucker noted that despite different societies' distinctive gender and sexual cultures, their divergent relationships to the world economy, and their unique political contexts, the late twentieth century nonetheless still saw the emergence of "identifiable common elements of lesbian/gay identity in one country after another." 4 More recently, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin Manalansan have stated, "Queerness is now global. Whether in advertising, film, performance art, the Internet, or the political discourses of human rights in emerging democracies, images of queer sexualities and cultures now circulate around the globe." 5 These observations have raised the question of what has produced similar gender and sex outcomes in diverse social, political, and cultural settings.

Queer Archives By the nineteenth century a vast array of ethnographies such as racialization, class, sexuality, gender and criminology had become the cornerstone to the social sciences. The body became a site of social regulation, and the notion of truth and its manifestations on the body became culturally realized through systemic ideologies. The social body was the triumph of Bourgeois order, where the political economy of Industrialism, Capitalism and Imperialism were entwined with the individual and the state, and where sexual conduct was converted to economic and political behavior. The category of homosexuality was a device meant to control and regulate. Foucaultian analysis asserts that nineteenth century prohibitions established far reaching oppressive sexual discourses, however, through systems set out to control sexuality - homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf (Foucault 1980). The queer archive provides a site of memory that historically has been entrenched in erasure, inscribing both the archives and their users with political power. Without knowledge of the past, what can we expect of future queer subjectivities?

American Quarterly, 2004

Sociological Theory, 2007

In this paper, I revisit the relationship of queer theory and sociology in order to address some critical issues around conceiving the subject and the self in sexualities research. I suggest that while sociology and queer theory are not reducible to each other, sociology has its own deconstructionist impulse built into pragmatist and symbolic interactionist analyses of identity and subjectivity that is often overlooked by or reinvented through queer theory. But, conversely, queer theory has a very specific deconstructionist raison d'etre with regard to conceiving the sexual subject that marks its key departure from Foucault and sociology more generally. This deconstructionist mandate, by definition, moves queer theory away from the analysis of self and subject position—including those accruing from race, class and gender—and toward a conception of the self radically disarticulated from the social. This “anti-identitarian” position has been a source of criticism among some sociologists who find in queer theory an indefensible “refusal to name a subject” (Seidman 1993:132). But this criticism, I suggest, stems from a misplaced effort to synthesize queer theory and sociology when, in fact, the two approaches to the subject are founded on incommensurable methodological and epistemological principles. Rather, I argue that the very promise of queer theory rests in a strong deconstructionism that exists in tension with, rather than as an extension of, sociological approaches to the self.