Introduction to Queer/ing Regions

Having been launched at a symposium at Nottingham Trent University in February 2013, the themed section Queer/ing Regions addresses the potentials of critical regionalisms in contemporary queer studies. The section explores the ways in which the complex regional/local formations of sexual dissidence emerges, if not being instrumentalized, as objects of theoretical inquiry when addressed within a global context by means of transnational formations of academic practice. Rather than appropriating queer theory through a global-local vector and affirming the complex alterity of the local vis-à-vis the flattening performative of the global, the contributors underline the regional complexities of sexual politics, the multi-scalar aspects of its spatial production, and the discourses of its worlding.

2011

Queer studies and the discussions within this field are international and the scholars are mobile. Still, it is important to keep in mind that a globalized world characterized by transnational trends is not homogeneous, not even within the so called Western cultural sphere. Local contexts are various and they are significant regarding both the organisation of research activity and the analysis that are made. The local context is particularly important when the interaction between research and society is highlighted. For example, in the customary genesis, the beginnings of queer theory are described as an outcome of an encounter between poststructuralist thinking and a radicalisation of activism that reacted against ever harsher attitudes in society during the AIDS crisis in the United States, a bit more than twenty years ago.

The Postcolonial World, 2017

The 2012 Turkish movie Zenne Dancer (dir. Alpay and Binay) narrates the real-life story of Ahmet Yildiz, a Kurdish youth, who, at the age of 26, was shot dead allegedly by his father in Istanbul because of his aberrant sexual orientation. 1 Deriving from the Persian word zen [woman], and also evoking one of the historical characters appearing in Turkish theatrical shadow plays like Karagoz from the fifteenth century onwards, zenne refers to a man in drag; and today the word is used for campy male belly dancers in the Turkish language. The movie presents Ahmet and his zenne friend, Can, as victims of social, familial, and state violence. The story of the two "queer" men reaches its climax when they try to acquire an official exemption from their military service that is obligatory for all "healthy" males in Turkey. 2 For Can and Ahmet, there is only one possible way to avoid this service: undergoing an interview with military doctors to prove their "homosexuality" by adopting extremely flamboyant and feminine manners during the interview, and providing the military officials with photos of themselves having sex as evidence for their pasif [passive] sexual behavior. 3 After being diagnosed as "psychosexually disordered" by the military doctors, and forced to come out to his father as ibne, the leading character Ahmet is shot dead by his father to save the honor (namus) of the family right before his European boyfriend Daniel was to "save" him by taking him to Europe. 4 The movie not only evinces the everyday lives and struggles of queer people, but also invites us to consider the complexities of different queer subjectivities (i.e. ibne, zenne) that coexist simultaneously in contemporary Turkey. In this essay, I explore how these struggles and perceptions of sexual identities are interlinked with the historically changing sexual discourses as they have been shaped by state policies, nationalism, globalization, and westernization. Going back to the Ottoman modernization as the primary means of adopting western sexual identities in the nineteenth century, I propose to map out a genealogy of different sexual identities to better highlight indigenous terms, categories, and models as well as a blend of historical continuities and ruptures in Turkey. 5 In the nineteenth century, there occurred an epistemological shift in Ottoman sexual attitudes by which the object of sexual intercourse gained

This essay reviews three books that center on the globalized city as a key site for unpacking disparate queer cultures. Two of the books discussed make an explicit effort to deterritorialize queer historiography outside the global North. They focus on the everyday experiences of postcolonial subjects in Cape Town and Hong Kong. In a moment of intensified counterterrorism, necropolitical nationalism, and resurgent yet covert forms of empire, both works have much to say about how the lives of sexual minorities are simultaneously affected by and resist Western imperialism. Thus they also enter into an already ongoing debate in contemporary queer studies that challenges the normalization of queer politics as a product of expanding capital both locally and abroad. All three books trace the shifting forms of the nation-state and how it affects the lived experiences of queer populations in the city. In the process, they collectively refuse the seemingly axiomatic notion that queer subjects are always being homogenized by transnational capital and neoliberal cosmopolitanism. Rather, as Andrew Tucker suggests, the hybrid queer cultures present in the city demand a more nuanced understanding of how these communities are shaped by historically, geographically, and politically specific national and cosmopolitan ideals.

Antipode, 2002

This collection has been several years in the making and arose in large part as a result of my participation in the Lesbigay Caucus and (as co-chair, with Glen Elder) the Sexuality and Space Specialty Group (SSSG) of the Association of American Geographers (AAG). In these venues and as a discussant or participant in several SSSG-sponsored sessions in annual AAG meetings, I experienced palpable, gendered tensions amongst queer folk. My supportive co-chair and I tried to negotiate some of these tensions by devising bylaws for the SSSG that would help structurally to ensure gendered diversity in the leadership. In particular, we suggested that the chairship be permanently shared by two persons who occupied different "sexual subject positions." The motion was passed by the SSSG's membership and is now part of the nationally sanctioned SSSG's bylaws of the AAG. While technically the rule might result in two men or two women serving as co-chairs (the possibilities are many), it seemed likely at the very least that the stipulation would promote awareness of gender diversity issues.

… Conference of Asian Queer Studies. Bangkok, …, 2005

Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala’s collection of essays maps the circulation of the term ‘queer’ by outlining how same-sex intimacies and sexual politics from and of the Global South are theorised and entangled in processes of globalisation. The fifteen essays investigate if the societies of the Global South merely appropriate and propagate ‘an internationalist (read Euro-US) language of LGBT/queer rights and identity politics, whether it is imposed on them or whether there is a productive negotiation of that language’ (p. 19). Tellis and Bala offer a profound critique of theoretical frameworks in which same-sex discourses in the Southern Hemisphere are uncritically envisioned within a global ‘queer’ internationalist language, without discussing the term’s political, economic, and cultural underpinnings. It argues for a particular specificity when it comes to scholarly work on local expressions of same-sex desire, although refraining from nativist and cultural relativism rhetorics.

Progress in Human Geography, 2008

Scholarship on queer geographies has called attention to the active production of space as heterosexualized and has levelled powerful critiques at the implicit heterosexual bias of much geographical theorizing. As a result, critical geographers have begun to remark upon the resistance of gays, lesbians and other sexual subjects to a dominant heterosexuality. But such a liberal framework of oppression and resistance is precisely the sort of mapping that poststructuralist queer theory emerged to write against. So, rather than charting the progress of queer geographies, this article offers a critical reading of the deployment of the notion of 'queer space' in geography and highlights an alternative queer approach that is inseparable from feminist, materialist, postcolonial and critical race theories.