Asian American Sexualities by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134717927
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Fabled Territories

Such difficulties in speaking of sexuality diasporically are not easily rectified. But perhaps recognizing the uses to which queer South Asians, as I have alluded to above, put film music or bhangra or any other popular cultural form available to us is to force us to theorize queerness and diaspora in a way that at least confounds this easy cultural imperialism argument. It is to realize that such forms of transnational popular practice mean radically different things in different contexts, that it is not about a one-way flow of commodities, identities, or models of being and organizing; rather, it is about multiple and non-hierarchical sites of exchange, where queerness and ethnicity are being contested and made anew every step of the way. And it seems to do so in a way that formal attempts at forging new sexual subjectivities (the film fests and the panels) have yet to catch up to. This is not to romanticize popular culture, or to deny the dialogic relationship between theory and practice, but I do get the sense that what is going on through informal popular cultural practices exceeds the theoretical models that we have been working with so far. Paying closer attention to these varied performances of a queer South Asian counter-public demands that we theorize queer diaspora in a particular way: not in terms of an immutable, generalized queer subject that inhabits this diasporic space, nor in terms of a notion of both queerness and diaspora that replicates existing power structures between the west and the rest. Instead, the new paradigm of queerness gestured to by queer South Asian diasporic cultural practices is one that interpellates a translated geography of pleasure, what poet and activist Ian Rashid calls a “fabled territory”32 where new sites of deterritorialized desire are continuously being produced. Yet, even within this translated geography, it remains to be seen if we can fully avoid enacting the various forms of conceptual violences that I have sought to foreground here.

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