Another term we meant to question in this issue is the word “Queer.” For this, we turn to Petrus Liu who argues that queer is not an exclusively Western identity and should start from non-Western experiences and communities, and urges us to consider Marxist political analysis of an asymmetric but interconnected world, rather than cultural differences, as a useful way to decenter queer theory from its US paradigm.
“Is homosexuality a Western concept?” “Is queer theory Eurocentric?” As a transnational scholar of color with deep roots in Sinophone communities, I have encountered these questions in all stages of my academic career and grassroots activism. My friends in China and Taiwan like to tell me that “tongzhi” is not gay in the Western sense because the basic sociological unit of Sinophone cultures is the family rather than the individual. An uncritical application of an US style of sexual politics risks presenting a country like the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—where coming-out is not a common goal and same-sex marriage has not been legalized—as culturally backward. Moreover, the conflation of tongzhi with Western homosexuality overlooks premodern China’s rich tradition of same-sex erotic relations, tolerance, and harmony, for which there is no Western equivalence.
There are clearly good reasons for rejecting the universalizing claims of queer theory. In my own writing and activism, however, I have been less interested in defending the singularity of East Asian cultures than finding ways for queer theory to expand its horizons through engaging non-Western histories and epistemologies.
Rather than emphasizing their incompatibility, I have striven to build transnational conversations and solidarities. For me, queer has always been a term from the Global South.
My key insight comes from queer theory itself, which is quite different from empiricist forms of gay and lesbian studies. While the latter begins with fixed identities, queer theory often does just the opposite. Queer theory challenges categories we take for granted as self-obvious, natural, or immutable—for example, the continuity between sex assigned at birth and gender identity; the distinction between proper and improper desires; and what constitutes family, kinship, and community. Queer theory is, moreover, a kind of doing, a form of socially conscious intervention that calls into question the blind spots of heteronormative and cisnormative worldviews.
“Queer” does not describe something that already exists. Instead, queer inaugurates a certain kind of future of intelligibility for beings who are not yet available for description and political mobilization. Queer theory begins with the acknowledgment that one cannot define the terms of a political project in advance. Queer theory argues that all identity categories are necessarily partial and incomplete. Indeed, identities are constituted by that which cannot be known or defined in advance. Queer in this sense is neither yet another category of identity (“I’m queer”) nor an umbrella term for all LGBTQIA+ communities, although it is commonly understood this way in the United States. Rather, queer is a material reminder of one’s relation to an unequal structure of power. It is a sign of linguistic humility, a way of taking stock of the necessary gap between the horizons of human cognition and the actual diversity of bodies, identities, and sexual practices in human cultures. The term queer allows us to acknowledge that the world is a much more complex and mysterious place than we ever thought possible. This conception of queer as the placeholder for a collective historical subject-in-process highlights the problems of cultural comparison, linguistic translation, and political community. Geopolitics is not merely implied here; it is actually constitutive of queer, destabilizing the sovereignty of the knowing subject in the Global North.
But while queer was imagined as a method to destabilize social norms long perceived to be inevitable and immutable, this antinormative impulse does not mean that queer theory does not have its own blind spots. Queer discourse operates according to its own set of norms and naturalized assumptions.
For all its exposure of heterosexuality’s passing as the natural order of things, queer theory has not critically reflected on the construction of the West as a disembodied location.
While queer theory has developed a most compelling account of the failure of all linguistic efforts to capture the definitional and experiential complexities of the gendered subject, we fail to acknowledge that queer theory itself is constituted through a relation of alterity to a world created by the uneven accumulation of capital. Queer theory’s critique of the invisibly naturalized asymmetry of value assignment between hetero and homosexual lives has not been extended to a critique of the asymmetry of knowledge systems between Western and non-Western cultures. This lack of reflection has resulted in a problematic view of Western organizations of gender and sexuality as the default basis of queer theory, from which viewpoint one then seeks to extend visibility and recognition to an imagined “gender pluralism” of non-capitalist societies. The danger of searching for “great paradigm shifts” in a global history of sexuality risks assimilating the Other as an anthropological specimen of the speaker’s own frame of reference, which is enriched and expanded but not altered in the process.
In the 1990s, queer theorists habitually turned to the non-Western world in search of examples of gender variance in order to reveal the constructedness of “homosexuality as we understand it today.” While queer theory addresses how certain bodies fail to materialize as a consequence of their exclusion from culturally available ideals of embodiment, the cultural variability thesis equivocates between anthropological incommensurability and gender heterogeneity. Sometimes “gender variance” refers to the differences in gender presentation or expression within the same society. Sometimes “gender variance” is used by scholars who believe that gender is a cultural variable and a context-dependent social construct. But while both arguments are logically compelling and politically valuable, the second is often made in the service of the first. Many scholars conduct research on non-Western sexualities in order to prove that homosexuality is a Western concept. In other words, though anthropological research introduces various examples of non-Western subjects of gender variance (such as hijra, travesti, berdache, tongzhi, muxes, and kathoey), such projects often serve the primary purpose of deconstructing Western understandings of homosexuality and end up conflating them with the pre-history of Euro-American notions of homosexuality (pederasty).
Is it possible that liberal queer theory’s efforts to include, represent, and explain non-Western sexualities as alterities to “homosexuality as we understand it” produce an optical illusion of diversity? Is it possible that, within a traditional taxonomy of sexualities, both Western and non-Western subjects are projections of the same concept, while the actual history of the non-West remains an aporia, a linguistic absence? What happens when we consider how queer theory itself is constituted through the exclusions of non-Western histories and cultures that return to haunt a global history of sexuality as demanded by developments in contemporary capitalism?
So what might be an alternative to this kind of cultural essentialism I am outlining in this piece? I continue to believe that Marxism offers the most systemic and persuasive account of the material structure of power that governs coexisting but asymmetric societies. While Marxism certainly has its own theoretical and political limitations, I find it useful to focus on the contradictions of a globalizing capitalism instead of the transcultural applicability of terms like “homosexuality” or “queer.” Instead of treating societies as hermetically sealed entities, a Marxist analysis can help establish an alternative perspective on the geopolitical contexts for the production of sexual expression, identity, and communities. In my most recent book, The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus, I develop this kind of analysis to recast queer theory as a transnational dialogue between languages and knowledge paradigms. Whereas a previous generation of scholars turned to the Global South for examples (of gender variance or pluralism), transnational queer theory today turns to the global South for epistemologies. Unlike earlier efforts to historicize the invention of homosexuality through speculations about its absence in non-Western cultures, transnational queer theory questions the terms that constitute the first-person plural in “homosexuality as we understand it today,” asking why earlier writers have simply accepted that the “we” must unproblematically refer to the white Euro-North American male, and how the construction of the West as a coherent and knowable category is accomplished through the exclusion of other languages and locations. From this viewpoint, the form of queer theory that emerged in US epistemologies in the 1990s was itself a belated effort to participate in conversations that were, in fact, global and multilingual in nature. I argue that the emergence of queer theory and politics was not a US liberal achievement from Stonewall to Obergefell that was subsequently copied, translated, appropriated, or resisted elsewhere. Rather, the category of queer has always been eminently global, and to understand its full richness we need to learn from the historical experiences and hemispheric epistemologies of other communities across world regions.
Instead of thinking of non-European sexual subjects as underrepresented victims in need of search and rescue, I turn to them as differently situated knowledge producers in the history of the uneven accumulation of capital.
Neither a term owned exclusively by US critics nor a Euro-North American project of cultural imperialism, queer must be constantly supplemented and revised by transnational modes of dialogue and solidarity. While 1990s queer theorists cautioned us not to apply queer theory to non-Western cultures, for today’s queer theorists there is not a more urgent task. The changing conditions of global capitalism compel queer theory to move from the history of sexuality to the location of sexuality, making it possible for non-Western subjects to be the protagonists of queer theory rather than its cultural resistance. ■