Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

Summer 2008

Department

Women and Gender Studies

Abstract

Queer theory has always been attentive to often undertheorized relations between sexuality and cultural citizenship. Recently, much of the most exciting queer scholarhsip has directed its atetntion toward an analysis of spaces outside of the United States and beyond the West, focusing in particular on transnational communities affected by ever-expanding global capital and imperialism. In an issue of Social Text (“What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?”), the editors suggest that a reinvigorated framework “insists on a broadened consideration of the late-twentieth-century global crises that have configured historical relations among political economies, the geopolitics of war and terror, and national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies.”1 In other words, a renewed queer theoretical frame must thoroughly adapt to and expand upon the specific ways in which counterterrorism, mass consumerist culture, and battles for legal recognition have compartmentalized nonnormative populations. This new queer work examines new forms of subjugation across national borders and requires that we reevaluated sexual, gendered, and racial politics in a global age. What iterations of queer culture are produced at this crucial juncture? How might a range of performance practices contest, negotiate, articualte, and heighten these iterations?

Comments

This item was originally published in Criticism, 50(3): 533-542. © 2009 Wayne State University Press

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