Content provided in partnership with

Introduction: Racialized lesbian desire on the transnational scene

College Literature, Feb 1997 by Jean Walton

Walton is assistant professor of English and Women Studies at the University of Rhode Island. She has published in Critical Inquiry, Discourse, College Literature, and Contemporary Literature.

Most Popular Articles in Arts: Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism; Free-standing cardboard sculpture; What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...; Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...; Tino Sehgal at the ICA; More »

When I was asked to co-edit this section of College Literature, and offered as much scope as I pleased in defining the focus I would take, the proposition struck me as the perfect opportunity to foreground what I think are the most compelling interdisciplinary enquiries of the "queer nineties": those which take place at the intersections of sexuality with race and (post)colonial studies.l The questions I posed in my call for papers were indicative of the kinds of essays I was looking for: How has lesbian/gay/queer theory, or more particularly, explorations of the sexualizing and gendering of the "subject," come to be articulated with questions of racial and/or ethnic subjectivity? In what ways have queer nationalisms intersected with, conflicted with, been challenged by other nationalisms? How has lesbian/ gay/queer studies come into dialogue with or been brought into crisis by African American, Native American, Latino/a, Asian American, post-colonial, Jewish, "ethnic" studies? If lesbian/gay/queer theory has evolved as a predominantly white/Western political and disciplinary project, to what extent has it begun a critical interrogation of its un-marked whiteness? How applicable are Western models of sexuality/sexual liberation for "third world," post/colonial, or post/communist states? What revisions of psychoanalysis (a prime site for "queer" articulations of sexual difference) make it responsive to the question of how subjects are simultaneously "sexualized" and "racialized," or of the interdependency of ethno- and heterocentrism?

As it happened, the responses I received, resulting in the essays which appear below, define a much more integrated domain of enquiry than I had anticipated, though from significantly different perspectives. All four articles, with their emphases on lesbian subjectivity, challenge not just queer but also feminist studies to account for the multiple and conflicting ways in which homoeroticism among women is inflected not only by racializing narratives on the U.S. domestic scene, but also by that scene's entailment in the international, post/colonial sphere, where the sexual is inevitably bound up with global networks of power and exploitation. They share a concern not only with the way in which women's desires are generated and routed through racializing, nationalist and (neo)colonialist circuits of production, but how their bodies are simultaneously gendered, degendered and regendered in the process. In at least three of the essays, both gender identity and homoerotic disposition could be said to emerge from cross-identifications with hybrid, deformed or ambiguously gendered versions of the masculine. In this foray into queer studies, lesbians are not only "not quite, not white" to borrow a phrase from Homi Bhabha, but "not quite, not feminine" nor masculine either, for that matter. In each case, however, the implications are quite different.

Ann Pellegrini's article charts the emergence of queer theory on the U.S. domestic front, noting its connections to, and departures from, both feminist theory and lesbian and gay studies, and exploring the possibilities for addressing "the problematic of `race"' as anything other than "an after-thought or secondary feature." Pellegrini notes that for many feminists of color who are also queer, anti-racist critique has always gone hand in hand with a feminist or lesbian politics, but that until recently, white feminist or lesbian theorists have not considered the way in which they are "raced" to be an important or relevant aspect of their political agendas. Writing about race has, for too long, been considered more "properly" the vocation (and obligation) of women of color. To pursue in more depth the urgent necessity of understanding the interdependency of race, gender and sexuality, Pellegrini takes as her case study a striking, but unexamined, trend in mainstream and independent films depicting "lesbian" subjectivity. Deftly anatomizing the way racial blackness is deployed in these films, she identifies not only the most pernicious instances of cinematic representations of identification and desire across racial boundaries, but also at least one film that promises to make way for a more liberatory politics. This last example permits Pellegrini to explore "what [it] would . . . mean to allow that the eroticization of difference can sometimes be the ground of politics and not its Maginot line."

The domestic front so well delineated by Pellegrini is re-located within a global context by the three articles that follow, as each author affords a view of U.S. queer theory as it is intercepted by a transnational perspective. "Queer nationalism," as conceived in terms of contemporary and historical U.S. politics, appears very American (and very white?) indeed when beheld by women whose queered perspectives are as much products of as refugees from the gendered nationalist histories specific to their geo-political locations. Wendy Somerson decries, on the one hand, the failure of transnational feminism to address homoerotic desire, and on the other hand, the reluctance of queer theory to explore sexuality in a transnational frame. Neither discourse would seem, therefore, to have the analytical apparatus to gauge the complexities of same-sex desire in a narrative such as Red Azalea, Anchee Min's autobiographical account of her gendered and sexualized trajectory through the Chinese Cultural Revolution. But by deploying a strategy common to both transnational feminism and queer theory-a recent reliance on the framework of geography to "map out the spaces of social relations"Somerson performs a skillful and detailed reading of Min's memoir. Through her analysis, we see how the state sponsored "degendering" of women in Communist China is productive of homoerotic desires and practices that transform and subvert official ideology. Moreover, by stressing the "transnational" relation of Communist China to the U.S. (rather than presenting it as a self-contained "Oriental" space of sexual repression), Somerson throws into relief American implication in the gendered and sexual politics that marked the Cultural Revolution. The narrative of transformative lesbian eroticism Min shares with a woman in the all-female barracks they inhabit becomes, through Somerson's analysis, an instance whereby the "disruptive excesses of desire" are unleashed to "provide a realm of resistance to transnational corporate uses of women's bodies and labor."

Introduction: Racialized lesbian desire on the transnational scene

College Literature, Feb 1997 by Jean Walton

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in Arts

Most Popular Publications in Arts