why queer diaspora?

‘Why Queer Diaspora?’ intervenes at the intersection of queer theory and diaspora studies to ask how the conditions of geographical mobility produce new experiences and understandings of sexuality and gender identity. More particularly, this essay argues against a prevalent critical slippage between queer and diaspora, through which the queer is read as a mobile category that, like diaspora, disrupts the stability of fixed identity categories and thus represents a liberatory position within the material and geographical displacements of globalization. Instead, I posit that the work of ‘queering’ diaspora must be to examine the new articulations of normative and queer as they emerge in the transformations of the late twentieth century. To this end, the essay looks to two contemporary documentaries, Remote Sensing (Ursula Biemann, 2001) and Mariposas en el Andamio/Butterflies on the Scaffold (Margaret Gilpin and Luis Felipe Bernaza, 1996), as models of alternative articulations of the queer and the diasporic. Ultimately, I argue, it is a focus on the labour through which the seemingly natural categories of gender and sexuality are produced, that a queer diasporic criticism might offer.     

Impossible Hosting: D'lo Sets an Undomesticated Stage for South Asian Youth Artists

At the center of this article is D'Lo, a Sri Lankan American hip hop performance artist, as the host of YouthWallah, a performance in Los Angeles, which features the work of South Asian youth artists. The focus of the article is on the possibility of an undomesticated stage that D'Lo creates for community youth artists as a female, yet unmistakably masculine host who translates female masculinity to a primarily straight South Asian audience as herself and, in drag, embodying her mother. D'Lo's performance includes autobiographical narratives of being gay and South Asian, which she uses to ground her politics in her experience. D'Lo does not perform the “exclusion” of a queer subject from a diasporic home. On the contrary D'Lo, as the host of this article home of YouthWallah 2004, provides an important undomesticated stage for the emergence of South Asian diasporic youth artists' voices and their alternative imaginations of diaspora. Therefore it becomes necessary to rethink the common conflation of notions of home and notions of domesticity, as a colonially inflected version of the home, which reproduces a colonial and gendered relation of power and thereby precludes the imagination of a decolonized community.     

Impossible Hosting: D’lo Sets an Undomesticated Stage for South Asian Youth Artists

At the center of this article is D'Lo, a Sri Lankan American hip hop performance artist, as the host of YouthWallah, a performance in Los Angeles, which features the work of South Asian youth artists. The focus of the article is on the possibility of an undomesticated stage that D'Lo creates for community youth artists as a female, yet unmistakably masculine host who translates female masculinity to a primarily straight South Asian audience as herself and, in drag, embodying her mother. D'Lo's performance includes autobiographical narratives of being gay and South Asian, which she uses to ground her politics in her experience. D'Lo does not perform the “exclusion” of a queer subject from a diasporic home. On the contrary D'Lo, as the host of this article home of YouthWallah 2004, provides an important undomesticated stage for the emergence of South Asian diasporic youth artists' voices and their alternative imaginations of diaspora. Therefore it becomes necessary to rethink the common conflation of notions of home and notions of domesticity, as a colonially inflected version of the home, which reproduces a colonial and gendered relation of power and thereby precludes the imagination of a decolonized community.     

wal-mart, ‘katrina’, and other ideological tricks: Jamaican hotel workers in Michigan

This essay explores the relationships between labour and community formation in order to think through how, where, and when diasporic solidarities are imagined or refused. I draw on ethnographic research among Jamaican women contracted for seasonal work in US hotels to situate diasporic calls and responses in relation to specific contexts and a changing global political economy. I show how global geopolitical shifts not only shape the processes of identity formation and social reproduction, but also condition the perpetuation of notions of nationalized racial hierarchies and ideologies of progress. I also show that hotel workers' notions of ‘America’ and their commitment to the ‘American Dream’ shapes their subjectivities as migrant workers/consumers and, in their assessment, differentiates them from African-Americans, particularly those most immediately affected by Hurricane Katrina. In doing so, I demonstrate that one of the ideological hegemonies of diaspora is the idea that an individual's capacity to affect their own social mobility and that of their social network always outstrips the ‘locals’ in diasporic elsewheres.     

diasporic governmentality: on the gendered limits of migrant wage-labour in Portugal

This essay explores the meaning of diasporic practice as it has been applied within the contemporary Black Atlantic context. The general focus of this topic has been visible or performative practices that have broad audiences, ranging from diasporic members to the sociopolitically included or the privileged citizen. Moreover, the objects or products of diasporic practice are largely understood to be aesthetic; the literature has highlighted music, dance, art, and religion, for instance. In this essay I argue that a taken-for-granted prerequisite of a hierarchized viewing audience misses passing moments of negotiation that occur in silence or within disciplined exchanges among persons who we identify as diasporic. These practices build community in very powerful ways but may not leave lasting traces or archives; they have to do with fleeting displays of affect such as rage, shame, joy, etc. The ethnographic focus is African immigrant women's constrained work schedules in Lisbon and the ways their labour-time textures the types of community - building practices in which they engage on a daily basis. I address how gendered configurations of migrant labour-time -a condition for governmentality – influence the diasporic process by which a form of racial identification is assumed in the context of Portugal.     

‘I Like Your Colour!’ skin bleaching and geographies of race in urban Ghana

This article explores chemical skin bleaching practices in urban Ghana to demonstrate the ways that particular racialized understandings of meaning are deployed in a contemporary postcolonial African society. I argue that the processes of racialization indexed by skin bleaching in Ghana must be contextualized within global racial formations; specifically, they can only be understood by examining the interlinked local and global ideologies and practices of race. In elaborating this argument, the essay also engages with contemporary African diaspora theorization that tends to foreground diasporic identity and experience at the expense of contemporary continental processes. By bringing a postcolonial African society into a dialogue about race, processes of racialization, and the interlinked transnational construction of black identities, this essay offers one way out of the ambivalent relationship that I believe diaspora theorization has with Africa.     

Black geographies of struggle and pleasure in Nona Faustine’s White Shoes

In Nona Faustine’s photo series of self-portraits, White Shoes, the artist’s body becomes the agent in exposing the instability of racialized historical geography. Faustine revisits New York City’s landmarks to address what is missing or made invisible: a slave ship, a fugitive woman’s rebirth, or African burial grounds. Making herself visible where she is supposed to remain invisible, she highlights the unacknowledged connection between national wealth, nationalism, geography, and black labor. She discloses the topography of her travels as a changeable terrain, where one slips from the national iconic to ambiguous and finally, to the sacred. I suggest that Faustine doesn’t seek to democratize the extant historical maps, but to shift the terms of reading the city’s geography. She lifts the boundaries between the polarized pathways of knowing – the secularized and the sacred, the living and the dead, the verifiable and the missing. This shift is also made possible by the medium of photography and a feminist turn towards pleasures in one’s body. As Faustine comes to terms with the psychic and cultural inheritance of the diaspora, she moves from the collective body of pain towards black women’s pleasure in their own bodies without purging the history of sexual trauma.     

(ALL THE) SINGLE LADIES

In the film fragment Smart B**ch, two women—a black Sudanese-Australian and a white American-Australian—share what it means to be diasporic travellers and explore their similarities and differences within evolving feminist discourses which have in some ways abandoned the subaltern for the subdivided. No longer content to criticise the ways in which we speak for and to each other, and to accommodate hierarchies of class, race and sexuality, this ethnocinematic dialogue prefers these film personae to speak with each other and their audience using Conquergood and Denzin as performance ethnography guides, while challenging hegemonic notions of diaspora to include such diversities as adoptees, queers, and others.     

Fictionalizing Hospitality in Ahdaf Soueif's Short Story ‘Knowing’

Drawing on Derrida's double conceptualization of the ‘la question de l’étranger’, which he utilizes to unpack the notion of hospitality, this paper explores the question of foreignness in Ahdaf Soueif's short story ‘Knowing’, from her collection I Think of You: Stories (2007). Jacques Derrida uses the interrogative mode to examine the diasporic situation by looking at ‘the question of the foreigner’, which ‘is a question of the foreigner, addressed to the foreigner’. To Derrida, the diasporic condition is determined by the type of hospitality offered or withheld by visiting and hosting countries. Likewise, Soueif questions the notion of hospitality as she introduces homes and locales that seem uncongenial to foreign dwellers. In ‘Knowing’, Soueif portrays the foreigner's position as being marked by the presence or absence of hospitality. In this context, the Derridean conditioned hospitality could become invasive as it colours diaspora with its own peculiar brush. As she fictionalizes hospitality, Soueif blurs the line between home and host as well as that between guest and stranger. In the short story, she introduces the insidious effects of the new receiving culture as her fictional girl is not a guest since the host country withholds the Derridean unconditional hospitality; neither is she a stranger as foreignness dictates a sense of cultural dislocation, which is that of not ‘knowing’.     

Judith Scott’s What is Property?: an inquiry into principles of dependency,propriety, and self-possession of an “outsider” artist

The essay addresses the politics of biography in the interpretation and reception of “outsider artist” Judith Scott’s work. Drawing from feminism, disability studies, and Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s History and Obstinacy (1981) and its political economy of labor power, the essay proposes a new method of analysis which would foreground Scott’s work as a mode of institutional critique. Kluge and Negt ask “Can capital say ‘I’?.” The essay argues that Scott’s work compels a concomitant questioning of this “I” and the very terms of biography, authorship, and ownership that undergird the myths – and the institutions – of the “outsider” and her “art.”     

Performing the Filipina “mail-order bride”: Queer neoliberalism,affective labor,and homonationalism

The 2005 video/performance art piece, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride, by the Filipina American performance-art ensemble, the Mail Order Brides, examines the role of affective labor in constituting gay marriage as a form of US homonational belonging. In a contemporary context of capitalist globalization, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride critiques the subjugation of the third-world woman worker within a queer neoliberal logic, highlighting the inability of the mainstream US LGBT movement to address issues of race, migration, and labor. The Mail Order Brides enact forms of feminist camp and ethnic drag to denaturalize the affective labor that is embodied within the figure of the Filipina “mail-order bride.” In doing so, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride links an analysis of transnational Filipina labor with a critique of queer cultural politics in the US In its critique of queer neoliberalism, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride builds on and contributes to queer of color social movements committed to racial and economic justice.     

White Women. White Nation. White Cosmopolitanism: Swedish Migration between the National and the Global

Emerging from the concepts of white cosmopolitanism and white cosmopolitan femininity, this article analyses “cosmopolitan narratives” of Swedish migrant women who lived abroad for an extended period and eventually returned to Sweden. Based on eight months’ ethnographic work, including 46 in-depth interviews with migrants who had returned in Sweden, the article explores how national boundaries are both maintained and traversed in the construction of a “world citizen”. It is argued that the women’s self-identification with a cosmopolitan ethos is structured by whiteness, nationality, and class that grants uninterrupted mobility and “worldliness”. As symbolic bearers of the Swedish nation, national ideals act on the white women’s bodies internationally, in ways that both uphold and re-inscribe the nation into the global. Thus, apart from obscuring global inequalities, white cosmopolitan femininity is imbricated in both national and global politics as a place where global structures reconnect with the white nation, thereby enabling Swedish migrants to re-install themselves into contemporary global settings as self-defined cosmopolitan subjects     

Inside the Home: Power and Negotiation in Filipina-Japanese Marriages

This essay examines the personal accounts of married Filipina-Japanese couples living in urban Japan to show how the women negotiate power and influence over their husbands. Centering on Filipino ideas about power and “America,” the article draws on various ethnographic vignettes that illuminate the Filipinas' cultural knowledge. By negotiating their relationships, Filipinas' marriages to Japanese emerge as ongoing processes rather than as a static institution in which the women are simply (oppressed) gender-role performers. While these women's struggles are not denied, their actions engender possibilities for the subversion of existing gender-national hierarchies. Belle faced Kawai. “I can't marry you.…I was raped by the son of a powerful man in my hometown. I'm no longer a virgin…” In tears, “Will you still marry me?” Kawai assured her firmly, “It doesn't matter.”     

Cross way cross civil war chronicles,part iii

What possibilities might melancholia offer for a queer ethics, and what might it mean to perform such an ethics onstage? In this essay the author analyzes mobile figurations of U.S. nationalism, violence, and visuality as theorized in the work of contemporary queer chorographers Bill T. Jones and Keith Hennessy. The author suggests that Jones's 1989 Untitled and Hennessy's 2006 Sol Niger evidence shifts in racialized sexuality and empire from the 1980s to the War on Terror, even as they both mark convergences between geopolitics and biopolitics. Reading these works together – despite their markedly different aesthetics and tones – elucidates a queer ethics rooted in and capable of contending with our contemporary political moment of war and U.S. empire building. Further, these works model how dance and other embodied, collective practices can engender what Jill Dolan calls “utopian performances” or possibilities for critique and transformation rooted in moving social bodies.     

Too Hot to Handle: The Cultural Politics of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Fire</Emphasis>

This essay explores the ways in which the definition of Indian culture has become a site of contest, and how this contest played out in the controversy that erupted over the release and screening of Deepa Mehta's diasporic film, Fire, in India. I locate this controversy within the broader controversies that are taking place over culture, particularly when issues of sex and sexuality are involved. The continuous targeting of representations of sex and sexuality, betrays an underlying fear that sex is something that is threatening to Indian cultural values, to the Indian way of life, to the very existence of the Indian nation. I discuss the responses to the release of the film by the forces of the Hindu Right as well as feminist and lesbian groups and critique the uncomplicated understandings of culture that informed these positions. Contingent upon these responses rests the story in Fire and the way in which the lesbian subject, a sexual subaltern, is constructed in the cultural space represented in the film. I challenge the positions that suggest that the women are represented as victims in the film, and draw attention to the cultural, sexual and familial ruptures brought about by the main protagonists through their desire for one another. I explore the complicated understandings of agency and desire that are represented through the assertion of this relationship.     

“I am myself it”: comparative national identity formation in the lives of Vera Brittain and Edith Stein

Abstract

This is a study of the tranformational impact of their World War One experiences on the national identities of two eminent feminist intellectuals, Vera Brittain and Edith Stein, each a volunteer Red Cross nurse on opposing warfronts. The essay examines how their gender, ethnicity, social class, and feminism intersect within this identity. To assess the War's impact, the author first probes – through extensive research in unpublished and recently published documents – the nature and evolution of Brittain and Stein's pre-war national identities, identities featuring a complex and ambiguous interplay of European and national consciousness. Through analysis of the tension between national and European identity in Brittain's and Stein's lives, the essay highlights key questions with regard to national similarities and differences in women's wartime experiences, as well as revealing critical factors vital to wider analysis of the War's impact on female national identity, particularly among educated middle-class German and British women.     

Sonia Delaunay: Fashioning the Modern Woman

Focusing on questions of gender and modernity, Gronberg examines representations of Simultaneous fashions designed by the Paris-based artist Sonia Delaunay in the German illustrated press of the 1920s. Simultaneous dress was presented as a means of rendering woman 'modern' both through fashion and through association with Parisian artistic avant-gardism. Gronberg explores the figure of the fashionably dressed Parisian femme moderne in relation to 1920s concepts of the neue Frau. The identity of Sonia Delaunay as an artist turned professional designer marked her out as a 'modern woman' and was crucial in the promotion of Simultaneity to international audiences. Delaunay's persona as a 'modern woman' also related to her status as a wife. The German press depicted Sonia Delaunay and her husband, the painter Robert Delaunay, as a Knstlerehepaar, an artist-couple exemplifying contemporary notions of 'companionate marriage'. Gronberg shows how such concepts of the modern woman were important not only in marketing Sonia Delaunay's fashions but also in claims for Robert Delaunay's post-war painting as a renewed form of avant-gardism. The essay concludes by considering Paris as a milieu in which women interacted with each other professionally-as writers, artists and photographers-engaging with and reformulating the visual imagery of modernity. The production, promotion and consumption of Simultaneous fashion during the 1920s reveals the 'modern woman' as both subject and object of representation. A preoccupation with fashion could be as much to do with challenging and overcoming, as with acquiescing to, stereotypes of femininity.