Such an intervention is in no way unique: Indeed, the GLQ special journal issue “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies” (2017), edited by Geeta Patel and Anjali Arondekar, had already begun navigating a territory in which questions about geography, post-coloniality, and translation were fused with queer theoretical concerns without reproducing the traditionalist and statist undercurrents of area studies. Furthermore, innumerable scholarly works, especially through the paradigm of queer of color critique, emphasize alternative epistemologies of queerness that run athwart mainstream underpinnings of sexual and gendered alterity; this includes but is no way limited to, books like Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gomez’s Bottoms Up: Queer Mexicanness and Latinx Performance (NYU, 2024); Anjali Arondekar’s Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke, 2023); Keguro Macharia’s Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across The Black Diaspora (NYU, 2019), Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama Of Black Life (NYU, 2018), to name only a few.
These contributions are undeniably crucial in their efforts to provincialize gender and sexuality to specific contexts, thereby making other locations and subjectivities available for queering. This panel takes such work a step further by offering a theoretically critical view of borders and our relation to them to clarify and critique some of the methods noted above. Rather than excavating unexplored contexts and archives of sexuality, then, this panel would think about queerness across different geographies without an easy return to conceptual truisms that posit indigeneity, precoloniality, postcoloniality, race, and location as self-evident terms. In fact, this panel will question a premeditated border between “dominant” queer theory and “minor” literature and think of the resonances across this dyad as well.
Putting in conversation scholars from different geographic contexts and stages of careers, this panel includes two international graduate students as well as established scholars who have been working within queer theory to model a genuine conversation of the limits and possibilities of the “field” today for both students and faculty. To allow for more discussion, the panel only includes three speakers presenting for 15 minutes each. The session presider, Professor Jack Halberstam, will set the stage for the conversation by providing a brief overview of the trajectory of queer theory and the need for a take that would expand its horizons of study across settled geographies and annals of study.
Taking forward the invitation to read beyond canonical archives, Srija Umapathy’s presentation, “Copies and Originals: The Infidelity of Language,” will closely analyze Park Chan-wook’s Korean film Decision To Leave to decidedly leave the insistence on linguistic and contextual legibility that underwrite liberal demands for minoritarian recognition within dominant scholarship. Exposing the illusory nature of linguistic origins, the film, for Umapathy, expresses how there is no language without counterfeited meaning or identity without duplicity. As such, Umapathy argues that queer theory would do well to take up untranslatability as a central tenant in reading across contexts.
Thereafter, I will continue this anathema against predetermined contextual framings by questioning the very understanding of the canon and its outside in my paper, “Strange Bedfellows: The Queer Possibilities of Reading Out-Of-Context.” Tracing the aesthetic resonances between certain unlikely archives like Bollywood films and British modernist novels, I would emphasize how the very production of a demarcated area as a distinct entity serves to flatten, rather than bring out, internal difference. Thwarting the desire for a “proper” understanding of a specific time and location, this paper will estrange familiar and familial methods of understanding sexuality as well as areas.
Finally, Professor Carole-Ann Tyler’s presentation would put into question the very production of the “West” as a referent to legible gendered and sexual figures through her paper “Less and More than Men: The Queer Life of the Castrato.” Reading the castrato as a border-crosser, Tyler suggests that this early modern “first-world” figure raises questions about “human rights” at the very moment of their emergence with democracy, today typically imagined at risk in the “third world.”
Such a conversation would hopefully excite a discussion that would critically meditate on methods and frameworks employed by contemporary queer scholarship and literary criticism. In this way, each panelist would put to critical scrutiny certain divisions that have been taken for granted in the study of sexuality and would exemplify the impossibility of fully bordering queerness into neat camps of scholarly study.