Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2006, volume 24, pages 777 ^ 790
DOI:10.1068/d63j
Decentering queer globalization: diffusion and the `global gay'
Natalie Oswin
Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, 1 Arts Link, Singapore, 117570; e-mail:
[email protected] Received 25 June 2004; in revised form 4 November 2004
Abstract. Queer geographers have been surprisingly slow to engage with the global turn that has existed for some time in queer studies outside the discipline. This is beginning to change but the range of sites addressed is limited largely to Euro-American ones. This paper considers the ways in which queer geographers might contribute to already-existing debates over the relationship between the `West' and the `non-West' in global queer studies. The paper departs from Larry Knopp and Michael Brown's ``Queer diffusions'', a paper that appeared in a special issue of Society and Space (2003, 21 461 ^ 477). Though they limit themselves to the national scale of the United States, their argument that we should destigmatize places and identities cast as `backward' has obvious relevance at the global scale. Its consistencies and inconsistencies with various strands of argument within the global queer-studies literature reveal that geographers might also learn from the spatial nuance developed in these debates. Specifically, this literature review concludes that we must also destigmatize those places and identities that are cast as `forward' if queer globalization is to truly be decentered.
Introduction The past decade has seen queer studies take a discernible global turn. Surprisingly, queer geographers have been slow to contribute to this trend. Appearances of a book and two recent special issues in geographical journals (Binnie, 2004; Nast, 2002; Puar et al, 2003) that take global queer geographies as their explicit foci are therefore welcome developments. However, the range of sites engaged with in these global queer geographical interventions to date has been noticeably limited. Largely concerned with the cultural politics of sexuality in Euro-Americanömore specifically, almost exclusively US and UK öcontexts,(1) geographers have largely left themselves out of a key debate within global queer studies: the debate over the contentious relationship between Western and non-Western same-sex sexual identities and practices. I therefore write in hopeful anticipation of more queer geographical forays into non-Western contexts and intend this intervention as one that sets an agenda of sorts for this future literature. The point from which I depart is one of the contributions to the ``Sexuality and space: queering geographies of globalization'' special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. In ``Queer diffusions'', Larry Knopp and Michael Brown point out that, despite the frequent invocations of nuanced spatial metaphors and rhetoric by queer theory, ``many queer theorists continue implicitly to work with rather limited and hierarchical notions of diffusion, in which centralized forms of (1) Contributors to the Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2003) special issue are preoccupied entirely with the United Kingdom and the United States. The only concerted nods to other contexts appear in Katherine Sugg's and Meredith Raimondo's papers as they discuss Cuban-American diasporic identities and invocations of `Africa' in AIDS discourse in the United States, respectively (see Raimondo, 2003; Sugg, 2003). The Antipode (Nast, 2002) special issue ventures further afield. It contains papers that look at the United States, Greece, India (Bacchetta) and a piece on queer tourism that considers Western tourists' engagement with a broadly construed non-West (Puar). Beyond these two special issues, few examples of queer geographical work in non-Western contexts are available.
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power more or less determine the geographical patterns whereby queer subjectivities, cultures, and politics spread'' (2003, page 409). These static notions of space and spatiality support the presumption that queer innovations originate in large urban areas and flow unidirectionally to peripheral or nonurban areas for adoption. Through a reading of interviews conducted with queers in Duluth, Minnesota, and Seattle, Washingtonö``two places in the United States that occupy quite different niches in a spatial hierarchy'' (page 414)öKnopp and Brown deprivilege the metropolitan scale. Emphasizing the importance of spatial hybridity and `counterflows' that run not just downward but upward, sideward, and multidirectionally, they usefully complicate our conceptualization of places that have been heretofore stigmatized as `backward' within queer studies by demonstrating that different places shape each other ``in a complex, multilateral, and diffuse process of mutual constitution'' (page 422). This insight is significant on its own terms. But I use it for my purpose of explicitly connecting global queer geographies with the extant literature on the subject of the negotiation of Western and non-Western homosexualities because it can be read as already implicitly doing so. As the guest editors remark, Knopp and Brown's argument is inherently useful for queer studies beyond the urban and national scales to which they limit themselves. In Jasbir Kaur Puar, Dereka Rushbrook, and Louisa Schein's words, the recognition of excessive rigidity in ``any mapping of sexualities that holds hubs or cores constant as sites of sexual liberation in contrast to repressive or heteronormative peripheries ... is of crucial importance to discussions of sexual `flows' at the global scale, where activists in Euro-American `centers' are at risk of dismissing the non-West as behind (in a unilineal sense) with reference to sexuality politics and the embracing of categorical queer identities'' (2003, page 386). It certainly is. But the novelty of this insight should not be presumed as it is by no means without antecedents in the broader body of work. From its recent beginnings one of the main guiding projects of much of the global queer studies literature has been to undermine a Western-centered queer globalization öand debates over the nature of `queer diffusion' have in fact been central to this endeavour. My purpose here is therefore twofold. First, I explore how Knopp and Brown's argument clashes with certain iterations of this project while strongly resonating with others. Second, I will examine the ways in which reading ``Queer diffusions'' through this broader globalization literature suggests that Knopp and Brown's argument must be pushed further in order to achieve their aim of lending nuance to our understanding of queer spatialities. Through a partial (2) literature review I examine various strategies that have been proposed and enacted for removing the West from the center of queer globalization and (2)Knopp and Brown's paper is a suggestive, agenda-setting piece that calls on geographers to conceptualize the notion of queer diffusion differently. In that same spirit my aim is to set an agenda for queer geographical work at the global scale. By surveying the ways in which the notion of `diffusion' is already at play in queer global studies, I want to establish a base upon which future geographical work can build to make meaningful rather than redundant contributions to an already well-established debate around the categories `Western' and `non-Western'. As Knopp and Brown rely on preliminary empirical evidence, I rely on a partial literature review. My aim is to outline certain contours in wide-ranging and not-always-explicit discussions of diffusion. To do so I will deploy examples from the literature that best exemplify the trends I wish to describe. Further, for the sake of coherence, the texts I utilize are almost exclusively concerned with Asian contexts. Any literature review is an act of caricature and this one is no exception. The queer-globalizations literature is one of much greater breadth than it will appear in these pages. For readers interested in exploring it the following sources encompass a much wider array of geographical sites than those cited in the text: Alexander (1994), Emilio Bejel (2001), Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin Manalansan (2002), Donald Donham (1998), Jarrod Hayes (2000), Neville Hoad (1999), Charles Klein (1999), Jose Quiroga (2000), Jennifer Robertson (2004), William Spurlin (2001), Carl Stychin (2003), and Ruth Vanita (2002).
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its study. From the glorification of different and hybrid localized expressions of homosexual identities beyond the West and intra-non-Western flows rather than Western to nonWestern flows to the employment of cross-scalar, multiscalar, and transcultural approaches, multicentering and discrete global and local spheres give way to decentering and mutually constituted scales. As such, these latter strategies closely adhere to the acephalous and multidirectionalöthat is, queeredönotion of diffusion that Knopp and Brown propose. They also highlight the necessity of pushing it further. Although Knopp and Brown have usefully complicated our understanding of the spatiality of queer cultures and politics by recovering ``the unique strengths and dignities of places and environments that have been unfairly stigmatized as `backward' in the otherwise well-queered arena of queer studies'' (Knopp and Brown, 2003, page 423), scrutiny of the ways in which transcultural, multiscalar and cross-scalar arguments have unfolded within global scale studies of homosexuality reveals that the Western queeröwho, not incidentally, is largely synecdochically read as the global queeröis often left in a spatial fix. To further the project of decentering queer globalization I argue that we need to deploy Knopp and Brown's insights for a task they did not anticipate. That is, we need to queer those placesöand the identities that are presumed to reside within themögenerally stigmatized as `forward'. Postcolonial, queer, diffusion Michel Foucault's genealogical approach to the history of sexuality has taught us well that the `homosexual' is not an essential, transhistorical category but an identity and object of analysis that came discursively into being in particular places and times. The purported exportation of this identity from the `West' to the `rest' has likewise produced a new category: the `global gay'. Any tracing of his (the use of the masculine pronoun is intentional for the literature rarely speaks of the `global lesbian' and when it does she is implied within or added onto the term `global gay')(3) emergence would have to include a look at Dennis Altman's (1997) influential essay ``Global gaze/Global gays'' as a pivotal moment in the announcement of his presence. In it Altman tries to make sense of what he observes as expressions of `Western-style' gayness outside the West and launches an agenda of sorts for global queer studies as an undertaking that must carefully explore the workings of global ^ local, Western ^ non-Western, and traditional ^ modern binary relationships as gayness globalizes. In other words, he asserts the importance of looking at the way in which homosexual identities are diffused at the global scale. For Altman this process of diffusion is somewhat straightforward. As he neatly claims in a later essay, ``the images and rhetoric of a newly assertive gay world spread rapidly from the United States and other Western countries after 1969'' (2001, page 29). What look like `Western-style' expressions of gayness are, in his analysis, exactly that. In Asia öthe (rather broad) locale from within which the bulk of his empirical evidence comesöAltman finds that `self-identified homosexuals' view themselves as part of a common `global community'. These new gays embrace modernity in a move that is read as being just as much about embracing a Western identity as it is about embracing a sexual one. Despite this growing commonality, Altman seeks, however, to allay fears of homogenization via cultural imperialism by arguing against the notion that what is occurring is an inexorable march towards `development' that will find an end point in the proliferation of Western-style gay ghettoes across the globe.
(3)
Work within global queer studies overwhelmingly addresses male rather than female same-sex practices and identities: thus the male bias in the texts I discuss throughout.
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The reasons behind his optimistic nonteleological reading are twofold. First, with many people in non-Western countries choosing not to adopt Western sexual identities, alternative local expressions of homosexual cultures and identities survive. Second, and the central point of Altman's intervention, adaptation mitigates the impact of these external identities on non-Western cultural formations. He states: ``The ways in which the new gay groups of Asia, South America, and Africa will adapt ideas of universal discourse and Western identity politics to create something new and unpredictableöthese will be the interesting developments'' (1997, page 433). Despite usefully disrupting evolutionary narratives that maintain Western homosexuality as the pinnacle of modernity and development by temporalizing space,(4) space and spatiality thus remain largely fixed. Mirroring the metropolitan-innovation ^ peripheral adaptation argument that Knopp and Brown critique, Altman portrays queer innovations as originating in the West, flowing unilaterally to the non-West, and being adapted into diverse end points. However, it must be noted that, though original and strong, the center is not the only site of value for Altman. Within a statically rendered version of global queer flows, Altman manages to avoid the dismissal of the non-West as behind and in need of progress. Though arguing that a modern Western gay identity has already taken hold in many locales, he staunchly refuses to characterize this shift as developmental or progressive. And though denying the coevalness of `traditional' and `modern' sexual orders he nonetheless equally values traditional sexual orders as valuable alternatives to global homogeneity. In short, though maintaining troubling categorical distinctions and asserting that liberated queer cultures flow from the West to the rest, he does so in an attempt to foster diversity. So in addition to Puar et al (2003) suggesting that Knopp and Brown's argument can be productively extrapolated to the global scale to counter Eurocentric arguments that situate a non-Western periphery as moving unilinearly and inevitably forward to the eventual achievement of a sexual freedom originating in the West, this brief look at the way in which static spatialities underpin Altman's argument suggests that Knopp and Brown's argument can also add much-needed nuance to notions of diffusion deployed in work on global homosexualities that declares explicitly postcolonial aims. Indeed, this may be an even more pressing project as the point that Western queer activists and theorists have problematically imposed assumptions about the nature of homosexual identity and politics that simply do not fit in non-Western and postcolonial contexts has been not only well voiced but truly taken. In recent years, international gay and lesbian human-rights lobbying groups have concertedly shifted away from proclamations that gay and lesbian identities are everywhere uniform, and at the same time a strong thread within much of the scholarly queer globalization literature has been the need to decolonize it. The equation of queerness with visibility has been severely questioned and the insistence upon a trajectory from unliberated, prepolitical homosexual practice to liberated, out, politicized, gay subjectivity has been abandoned. To return to Altman, his work has been a particularly productive instigator of this sea change. Although others have shared his goal of respect for sexual diversity, disagreement with various facets of his logic has led them to propose different ways in which we might better realize a more truly postcolonial global queerness. What Paola Bacchetta (2002) has referred to as the ``from-Stonewall-diffusion-fantasy'' has been thoroughly discredited. But its disavowal alone has not always been enough to `queer' understandings of queer diffusion properly in Knopp and Brown's terms. (4)
See Hoad (2000) for a more pointed and insightful critique of both historical and contemporary theories of modern male homosexuality, in which ``living savages come to fill the fossil gap through a spatialisation of time written on the human body'' (page 135).
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Turning to an exploration of various modes of decolonization invoked in this broader literature, I consider the problematics of a tendency to undermine Western dominance by multicentering queer globalization. Difference and the multicentering of queer globalization
Altman has by no means been the only proponent of the view that queer globalization does not necessarily entail the transformation of sexual subcultures around the world into exact replicas of Western-style gayness (whatever such a thing might be). Scholar after scholar has ventured out into various fields to return with evidence of existing heterogeneous expressions of queerness. These mappings have calmed Western queer theorists' fears that `they' are becoming just like `us' and have moved us even more firmly beyond teleology. Though many arrive at the same conclusion that Altman does, these retreadings of the terrain of the global diversity of homosexuality often tell rather different stories about who `they' are and from whence this persistent global variety stems. How `they' move, however, looks much the same. That the world is turning gayöa fact stated with great conviction by Altmanöis a claim with which many find fault. As Peter A Jackson declares: ``Research by Western gay men and lesbians on homoeroticism in the rest of the world often seems to be motivated by concerns similar to those which lie behind the search for extraterrestrial life. A dominant but unspoken question guiding such research is: `Is there someone else out there like me?' '' (2001, pages 9 ^ 10). One of the researchers about whom Jackson speaks is Altman; and appositely so. Despite making qualifications that some non-Westerners make Western-style gay identities into something else via adaptation and that many other `others' maintain traditional identities, his point is fundamentally about sameness. Pitting Westernstyle gayness against traditional local homosexual practices, there can only be `us' and `them', only a universal identity or an absolute difference. For Altman, unless `they' are traditional, `they' must be modern. `They' thus become `us' and diversity stems merely from `their' variation on `our' theme. In short, universalism reigns. That `other' queers are not merely localized derivatives of the universalized Western Queer is a claim substantiated by the unveiling of new categories of gayness.(5) As many scholars find something other than Western-style gayness or mere indigenous homosexualities `out there'ösomething not just diverse but differentöAltman's mapping of modern and traditional onto Western and non-Western is abandoned. For instance, in his research on Thai homosexual discourses and practices, Jackson finds that, though gay and lesbian styles and terminologies have often been ``appropriated as strategies to resist local heteronormative strictures and carve out new local spaces'', these appropriations do not reflect ``a wholesale recreation of Western sexual cultures in Asian contexts. Instead they suggest a selective and strategic use of foreign forms to create new ways of being Asian and homosexual'' (2001, page 5, emphasis in original). That it is thus possible to be both not Western and homosexual has transformed the search for more of `us' around the world into a desire to understand `them'. The existence of terms such as tongzhi in China and bakla in the Philippines, terms that if we follow Altman's logic could represent only transliterations, are thus reread as signs of culturally specific modes of being whose meaning must be interrogated rather than assumed. Instead, Manalansan argues that baklaöa term used in the Philippines and the Filipino diaspora to refer to men who have sex with men ö``is not a prior (5)
For the purpose of argument in this section I read certain works within global queer studies to be representative of what I caricature as a narrative of difference in opposition to Altman's narrative of diversity. Though I set out this typology through an exploration of only a few selected works, see also Mark McLelland (2000), Martin Manalansan (1997), Alison Murray (2001).
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condition before assimilating into gay identity'' (2003, page 186). Instead, it is an ``equally a modern sense of self '' (page 186) that goes ``beyond the strictures of a white gay mode of living'' (page 191). It is, in this analysis, a new category that should be properly understood outside some imaginary relationship to a universal or Western gay identity. Chou Wah-Shan (2001) likewise outlines tongzhiöliterally meaning `comrade' and referring to homosexuals in China and within Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asiaöas a category distinguishable from Western modes of gayness as it is an identity grounded in the maintenance of the family-kinship system rather than in erotic-object choice. Casting cultural specificity in a slightly different light are narratives of hybridity that read certain iterations of queerness in the non-West as meldings of Western and non-Western homosexual identities. Chong Kee Tan (2001), for instance, narrates the rise of gay and lesbian discourse in present-day Taiwan as a process of cultural negotiation between contemporary and traditional values and between indigenous and foreign theories and practices. And, given cultural change and exposure to ideas coming from the USA, Hector Carillo asks ``can we assume that Mexicans are abandoning the traditional perceptions of homosexual identities and adopting more global, contemporary ones?'' (1999, page 227). His answer is an ambivalent ``yes and no'' for he sees hybridization at work. In these examples, less-distinct lines are drawn between the West and the non-West. The new identities which emerge through the process of hybridization are read not as Western or non-Western but as both and neither simultaneously. Merging rather than trumping takes place. Whereas Altman's Americanization thesis allows only one modern (read: Western) gay identity that can do nothing other than either trump or exist alongside a set of preexisting traditional (read: non-Western) same-sex practices, gay and lesbian identity categories proliferate limitlessly when read as either culturally specific or hybridizations as neither reading pins the modern or the traditional in place. In other words, we move from a narrative in which there is only one Homosexuality with many precursors (still existing contemporaneously in the traditional non-West) to one in which there are many Homosexualities. Altman's argument against a progress narrative is enhanced by the removal of the lines between the anachronistic and the contemporary and by the possibility that both can be found in the non-West, either through specifically nonWestern trajectories or via recombination with Western identities. As time becomes labile the supposition of a universal gayness manifesting itself in locally relevant forms is replaced by the recognition of distinct differences between modes of being queer in various locales. This reconfiguration ``forc[es] us to see Western eroticisms not as the model but as one set of historically specific forms besides many others'' (Jackson, 2001, page 7, original emphasis). These new identities simultaneously force us to see routes of diffusion other than that from the West to the rest. Jackson (2001), for instance, disrupts the Western origin story by retracing the historical development of gay scenes in Bangkok and Manila. Finding that they developed contemporaneously with those in Western metropolitan areas, he contends that the West cannot therefore be the original site of contemporary gay and lesbian identities. Along similar lines, Antonia Chao takes the West out of global processes of queer diffusion through an emphasis on intra-non-Western flows. Because similarities in lesbian sex-role identities emerged in various Southeast Asian countries around the same time and the term `tongzhi', which originated in Hong Kong, ``propagated instantly to nearly all Chinese societies in Southeast Asia'', she asserts that these ``transnational pattern[s] of sexual cultural products ... cannot be subsumed under the paradigm of Altman's more narrowly conceived model of Americanization'' (2000, page 383).
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Such assertions of non-Western origins and flows combine with the shift in emphasis from the presumption of the appearance of Western-style gayness in the non-West to the revelation of a multitude of different sexual orders to deprivilege the West in these rewritings of global gayness and its travels. They thus do what Knopp and Brown implore us to do when they suggest we should recover ``the unique strengths and dignities of places and environments that have been unfairly stigmatized as `backward' '' (2003, page 423). By challenging the thesis that innovations in queer politics and culture occur only in the West and are transferred to `other' places, the excavation of different erotic economies around the globe recasts the non-West. But, to queer diffusion, Knopp and Brown also assert that we must recognize the ways in which different places shape each other ``in a complex, multilateral, and diffuse process of mutual constitution, rather than through a more hierarchical process'' (2003, page 422). This language suggests that the task is not simply to deprivilege but to decenter. On this front, these narratives of difference, hybridity, non-Western origins, and intra-nonWestern flows (and, as I will explore in the next section, ``Queer diffusions'' itself ) fall short. Whereas Altman found only diverse expressions of a circumscribed gayness alongside transhistorical indigenous homosexualities, the other modes of decolonizing queer studies at the global scale that I have thus far laid out allow for multiple categories. Having undermined the view that Western eroticism is the model, we can now imagine the simultaneous existence of many. As categories and models proliferate, so do centers. Herein lies the problem. Key phrases deployed by Knopp and Brown are `mutual constitution' and `nonhierarchical'. But what happens here is the hierarchical reordering of what remain distinct spheres. The yardstick merely moves from West to non-West rather than being done away with. Revisiting each of the examples given above reveals the problematics of this maneuver. Manalansan's description of bakla as ``not a prior condition before assimilating into gay identity'' and as ``equally a modern sense of self '' (2003, page 186) rescues this identity from the stigmatization and reification that its labeling as `traditional' could potentially impose. He gives it value as a contemporary site of queer innovation in its own right, and helpfully so. But what is the ``white gay mode of living'' (page 186) that he suggests the bakla identity goes `beyond'? Why does the destigmatization of and recognition of the fluidity inherent within the bakla identity occur alongside the perpetuation of the myth that there is a knowable, coherent, and decidedly not fluid Western gayness? Why does the bakla come into being performatively as it ``dwells in the queer sites of the global city'' (page 186) whereas white gayness seems fixed in abstract space? Might not the non-Western and Western containers that the bakla and white gayness are portrayed respectively to fit neatly within leak? Prying the West and non-West apart in similar fashion, Chou declares, ``the focus of the tongzhi movement is not an isolated self called gay, lesbian, or bisexual, but the family and the social relations that both constitute and oppress tongzhi'' (2001, page 34, emphasis in original). His desire to set apart this category stems from the ``need to build up indigenous tongzhi politics'' as Anglo-American experience tends to be universalized and ``imposed on'' other cultures (page 27). But might the desire to resist the imposition of Western queer experience not artificially bound this new category? And, further, might its own colonial tendencies be elided? In her exploration of T-Po identitiesöidentities revolving around butch ^ femme distinctions öin Taiwan, Chao argues that feminist lesbian tongzhi activists deride T-Po identities as traditional and anachronistic and represent ``a cultural elite eager to be adopted into the global community of `comrades' [the literal translation of `tongzhi' and a reference to gays and lesbians]'' (2000, page 387). She states, ``state and feminist lesbians have constructed
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a subaltern class that can self-evidently highlight their global (and thus non-People's Republic of China) authenticity'' (page 387). In this light, might the global not be an imaginary that mutually constitutes all scales and that can be found in all places? Readings of queerness at the global scale through the analytic of hybridity, which the work of Chong and Carillo exemplify, wisely render the trumping of local subjectivities by global identities an impossibility. But, in the proposition that global and local, Western and non-Western, and modern and traditional identities can be combined to produce something new, their a priori existence is assumed. Even though lines get crossed to form the hybrid, might there be another way of casting global queer subjectivities without maintaining previously distinct and definable identity categories? Jackson's call to stop searching for sameness beyond the West has been well heeded. But, even in proliferation, categories still do the work of categories. They cannot but be arbitrary and limiting, fictive and occluding. In this case their multiplication serves the purpose of attributing value and the power to innovate to groups previously read only as throwbacks in urgent need of updating. However, in the desire to ``abandon the expectation, or hope, that Asian [or other non-Western] g/l/t [gay/lesbian/transgender] people are becoming like `us' [so that] it will be possible to begin seeing `them' for who `they are' '' (Jackson, 2001, page 10), many seem to have overlooked the fundamental violence of this new project of knowing `them', and, not incidentally, knowing `us'. In the eagerness to decolonize queer studies at the global scale and better our understanding of non-Western homosexualities, various problematic analytical moves have been perpetuated. Though the distinctions between the modern and the traditional have been collapsed and the merging of Western and non-Western identities have been allowed for, two overriding and interrelated separations persist: those of the West from the non-West and the global from the local. Recuperated as unique and autonomous, non-Western queerness is trapped in a local sphere that can at best only mitigate the effects of an imposing Western queerness that looms globally as a threatening cultural force. Innovations in non-Western contexts are overemphasized and romanticized as resistant while the global queerness that they are purportedly resisting the imposition of is rendered in only ambiguous, though strong, terms. Thus our newly proliferated categories are severely constrained. And, most significantly for my purposes, so are the ways in which their flows can be conceptualized. Jackson and Chao's respective propositions that gay scenes can originate autonomously in the non-West and that intra-non-Western flows are consequential are important insights. But they likewise represent multiplications instead of transformations. In each strategy inheres a desire to distinguish the non-West from the West that leaves the Western core intact while asserting the existence of other centers in the non-West. Though now having multiple sources, a unidirectionality of flows persists. Innovations in the West still flow to the non-West but, rather than being straightforwardly adapted, these locales are now recognized as centers in their own right and have the power to resist or at least to mitigate global impositions. Consonance with Altman here emerges as he states: ``if we abandon the idea that the model for the rest of the worldöwhether political, cultural, or intellectualöneed be New York or Paris, and if we recognize the emerging possibilities for such models in Bangkok and Harare, we may indeed be able to speak of a `queer planet' '' (1997, page 433). There is no reason to presume that flows from these models are anything but downward. The drawing of lines between the West and non-West and between global and local allows only the globalöwhich resides `out there' in the Westöto flow to the non-West and the new non-Western centers öthat develop in place locallyöto act as general innovators for both national and perhaps regional developments.
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Transculturation as global queer diffusion
Quiroga suggests we ask what it is ``that gives Anglo-Americans [a] penchant for a history that is always written within a structure that places them at the center even as it wonders if the center still holds'' (2003, page 133). This is indeed an important issue here for although narratives of difference undertake the task of undermining the centrality of the West in processes of queer globalizations this centrality is paradoxically asserted as a powerful force with which other newly recognized centers must still contend. But that we might be able to envision a decentering rather than a multicentering and recentering is attested to by alternative readings that adopt transcultural and multiscalar approaches. It is these paths that I think geographers might also travel down as we contribute in increasingly sustained ways to the global queer studies literature. Though reevaluating the relationships between the categories Western and nonWestern and global and local, narratives of difference maintain the dividing lines that separate them. In contrast, transcultural and multiscalar approaches let them fall away. Rather than valorizing a non-Western or local space as one of oppositional consciousness pitted against a Western or global dominance, the global ^ local divide is troubled by reading ``the local [as] often constituted through the global, and vice versa'' (Grewal and Kaplan, 2001, page 671) and the Western ^ non-Western-split is bridged by emphasizing the ``complexity of cultural production in the interactions of the West and non-West'' (Rofel, 1999, page 436). Typologies do not tell us much when we are studying queerness globally. Analyzing Taiwanese queer identities, Teri Silvio demonstrates as much: ``Taiwanese lesbian bar culture, academia, and koa-a-hi (6) are all worlds that mediate between concepts of the body that come with Western media products and discourses and concepts of the body that have been constructed in religious practice, agricultural and factory labor, and modes of fashion and gesture that reflect the specific history of Taiwan'' (1999, page 601). Similarly, Lisa Rofel argues: ``the emergence of gay identities in China occurs in a complex cultural field representing neither a wholly global culture nor simply a radical difference from the West. Rather, Chinese gay identities materialize in the articulation of transcultural practices with intense desires for cultural belonging, or cultural citizenship, in China'' (1999, page 453). There is therefore something other than the local and the global, and the Western and the non-Western. But, because the ways in which this something else comes into being vary in place as the product of historical and cultural contingency, it cannot be mapped, defined, and easily known. Instead, as Yukiko Hanawa counsels, because ``it is neither possible nor desirable to insist upon some pure local episteme: we must consider the circuits of desire'' (1994, page viii, emphasis in original). In a transcultural reading the global is not conceived as a synonym for the West and presumed to exist somewhere in abstract space constantly threatening to impose itself on the local. Rather, it is territorialized as potentially always and everywhere already present. Scales mutually constitute one another. Accordingly, diffusion is also recast. Desires to trace what are presumed to be firmly laid hierarchical routes traveling from one scale to another are displaced by a concern with scapes and flows that are cross-scaler and multiscalar. This insight has found itself in queer geography (6)
Describing koa-a-hi, Silvio states it is ``usually translated as `Taiwanese opera', women play all of the leading roles, and the women who play the male roles are the focus of a complex, nearly all-female fan culture'' (1999, page 585).
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in Paola Bacchetta's (2002) work. Dissatisfied with human-rights approaches that emphasize the national and transnational while ignoring the local ^ contextual and anthropological studies of queer difference that erase the global in favor of the local, she states; ``it might be most fruitful to address all possible scales, even when pinpointing only one. Perhaps transnational queerdom could be reimagined in terms of a thickly historicized, contextualized, rescaled transversality'' (page 953). To ``productively reimagine transnational queerdom through scale'' (page 968) she suggests we must pay ``energetic attention to the modes in which scale, scapes, scapeflows, and hot sites of power are produced by and embedded in shifting relations of power (of colonialism, postcolonialisms, gender, sexuality, race, class, religion, etc.)'' (page 970). Here, queer movements are let loose to flow sidewards, upwards, and multidirectionally rather than only downwards. Allowing for a multiplicity of flows while ruling out the possibility of the existence of a global gay looming over discrete local homosexuals positioned in opposition to it, transcultural and multiscalar readings of queer globalization get at the ``production of spaces of identifications, rather than of identity'' (Rofel, 1999, page 468). As the above quotes from Silvio and Rofel describing the historically and culturally contingent nature of queerness in Taiwan and China suggest, these approaches challenge the way in which we conduct our explorations of nonnormative sexualities in the non-West. They also challenge the way in which we conduct such explorations in the West. Though the figures of the West and the Western (read: global) queer loom large in sexuality studies at the global scale, an overriding concern with proving the existence or nonexistence of global queer homogeneity has focused this relatively new area of enquiry squarely on equally modern local homosexualities in the non-West. Narratives of difference preclude any shift in emphasis as they are grounded in the presumption of a fixed global realm. But the non-Western preoccupations of transcultural arguments might be read less as a necessary facet than as a product of the origin of such work as a reaction to and qualifier of global imposition ^ local resistance tales. As transculturation means we cannot know the non-West, it also by implication means we cannot know the West. In a rare example, Rofel makes this implication explicit. Taking a brief detour in her study of the transcultural nature of Chinese homosexual identifications, she describes the experiences of three Western expatriates. She states: ``These foreigners have brought with them a certain imagined way, delineated in part by Altman, of enacting a gay identity. It presumes that gay men ideally have relationships with other gay men, even as sexual desire for a variety of men is seen as natural; that gay identity therefore refers to all forms of homoeroticism; that sex lies at the crux of one's identity; that for this identity to signify, others must know about it and recognize it in public space; that one builds community around sexual identity; and that this community supersedes other forms of community (1999, pages 468 ^ 469). But the ways in which these Westerners have played out their queerness in China tells a different story than the one that the narrative of the imposing global queer leads us to expect. Rofel continues: ``Yet Jamie and a few other Western gay men have also playfully displayed drag queen behaviour, deliberately and self-consciously destabilizing gender dichotomies. Moreover, Jamie has felt that it is inappropriate to hold public demonstrations demanding gay rights; China, he explains, changed him, not the other way around. Sally argues forcefully for acceptance of bisexuality. Sam [who is Chinese-American] strongly feels that his desire to become more Chinese has made it impossible for him to represent one side of an [sic] West ^ East divide. Thus those from the West by no means present a homogeneous version of gay identity'' (page 469).
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Thus she concludes that ``Western gay identity does not enter China simply as an unimpeded flow'' (page 469). Although I would caution against any uninterrogated importation of Rofel's representation of these expatriates as bringing with them ``a certain imagined way ... of enacting a gay identity'', that Western gay identities should be explored in their instability is a potentially very productive intervention. It is also one that is simultaneously consistent with and an implicit critique of Knopp and Brown's queering of diffusion. It is consistent because, if places shape each other ``in a complex, multilateral, and diffuse process of mutual constitution'' (Knopp and Brown, 2003, page 422), neither the periphery nor the center can logically hold. It is also a critique because, if we insist that neither the periphery nor the center hold, not only those places and identities cast as `backward' öin Knopp and Brown's descriptionöare in need of destigmatization. So are those that are cast as `forward'.(7) Global queer studies beyond the ``other'' The stated aim of Knopp and Brown's intervention is to reveal the ways in which ``heterosexism is an incomplete, incongruous, nonhegemonic, and spatially diffuse set of social relations and practices full of possibilities for subversion and reconfiguration, rather than how it is a coherent, complete, spatially fixed, and hegemonic one'' (2003, page 413, emphasis in original). As the editors of the special issue in which ``Queer diffusions'' appears tell us, this is an insight made all the more important for the potential of its application at the global scale as well as at the national scale (Puar et al, 2003). In hopeful anticipation of a surge in queer geographical work in a greater range of sites, I have sought to explore the ways in which Knopp and Brown's argument resonates with and can be pushed further by already-existing debates over the relationship between the West and non-West in queer studies beyond geography. Globalization has reconfigured queer studies in significant ways. Among them has been the emergence of a concern that queerness can perpetrate colonization and marginalization. It is by now widely recognized that Western bias within queer scholarship and activism is a violence directed against queer cultures around the globe. Queer enquiry at the global scale must therefore ``radically interrogate and transform the lenses through which [Western queer studies] reads and appropriates desire, queer identity, and sexual difference, and ... self-reflexively examine its own imperialist and homogenizing impulses made possible through globalization'' (Spurlin, 2001, page 200). The way in which the project of decolonizing global queer studies has been undertaken, however, has resulted in the application of an inordinate amount of energy in looking at the impact of globalization on newly defined non-Western homosexualities. But the desire to know and coexist equitably with the `other' too often contains its own colonizing moves. Much work within global queer studies to date pursues the queering of `us' through the arrival at an understanding of `them'. It inverts the colonizing stance that (7) Knopp and Brown's piece is also open to critique on other grounds. They take pains to highlight the multiplicity of queer flows and counterflows, but the identities being transferred from place to place seem strangely reified. Gender and class are mentioned only briefly as factors that overdetermine queer diffusions, and race and nationality are entirely absent. Further, the scales that they detail as mutually constituting one another are limited to the urban, the regional, and the national. I wonder how consideration of the global might enhance their argument. I hesitate to push these points too far, however, as Knopp and Brown note that a ``more substantial empirical body of data'' needs to be developed ``to support or flesh out'' their conclusions (page 422). Hopefully, therefore, these issues will be addressed in further work.
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Westerners have much to teach the other in the ways of being queer by looking for models of queerness in the non-West that might be adopted by and therefore decolonize queer studies. The search for sameness has been replaced to a certain extent by a search for `queerer than queer' counternarratives. But a gaze set so firmly on the `oppressed other' deploys its own violence. Rey Chow states, ``where the colonizer undresses her, the native's nakedness stares back at him both as the defiled image of his creation and as the indifferent gaze that says, `there was nothingöno secretöto be unveiled underneath my clothes. That secret is your phantasm' '' (1993, page 52, original emphasis). Accordingly, through looking intently at the other, we may nonetheless learn nothing about `them'. At the same time, we learn nothing about `us'. As it seems we already know who `we' are we neglect to turn the gaze inwards. Our fixation with the `other' perhaps stems from the commonsensical notion that ``sexual subjectivities [are] less stable on the margins'' (Phillips and Watt, 2000, page 2). A center that holds is a center that we can presume to know. But, if we continue to look only outward, we will focus on the ways in which the Western queer model fails to fit in the non-West at the expense of exploring the ways in which it also fails to fit in the West. Transcultural and multiscalar approaches help us to see the ways in which the search for difference outside the West traps the non-Western queer in a category read as distinctly separate from an equally definable West and as only and always local. They also help us see that, as we set the non-Western queer loose beyond these categories, we must also unbind the Western queer. This is a claim that is in line with Knopp and Brown's general argument. But it also makes clear that a global queer narrative without centers and peripheries is one that destigmatizes both the `backward' and the `forward'. Taking this claim as given in future work on queer geographies at the global scale would, in my view, be a potentially very productive move. Like Knopp and Brown, the argument I have made here is about the analytical benefit of nonfixity. Where they detach the urban and the nonurban from hierarchical spatialities within a US national framework, I challenge the limitations of pitting the West and non-West and the Western queer and the non-Western queer, against one another. I deploy the Western ^ non-Western binary here because it frames the terms of the wider debate with which I have engaged. But I hope it is by now clear that it is widely recognized within global queer studies that, because of the specificities of place, this dichotomy does not hold. I have used the terms `Western' and `non-Western' freely because there is no precedence for not doing so. The spirit of my intervention is nonetheless animated by a desire to see a new vernacular developed in future global queer-studies work both within and beyond the discipline of geography. One final qualifier is also in order. My argument is obviously sympathetic to a politics of transnationality. Thus it must be said that ``there is nothing intrinsically `given' about the politics of transnationality, and those who make appeals to concepts of non-fixity, in-betweenness and third spaces as inherently progressive construct transnationality in _ one-dimensional terms'' (Crang et al, 2003, page 443). I have stated that a queered notion of queer diffusion at the global scale demonstrates that the center does not hold and that we therefore can spend less energy looking to the periphery to counter it. In pointing to the potential of exploring both the West and non-West in all their complexity as the transnational, transcultural spaces that they are, however, I am not suggesting that we no longer need to examine and be critical of the ways in which the center occupies the peripheries. Rather, I am insisting that we can more accurately evaluate context-specific power dynamics when we do not presume their nature and from whence they stem a priori. The argument that we should come to terms with the futility of knowing either `them' or `us' does not of course deny the
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existence of privilege along the lines of race, class, gender, and nationality within queer circuits but it allows us to trace its routes by making historically and contextually specific interventions rather than hegemonic contestations. References Alexander M J, 1994, ``Not just (any)body can be a citizen: the politics of law, sexuality, and postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas'' Feminist Review 48 5 ^ 23 Altman D, 1997, ``Global gaze/Global gays'' GLQ 3 417 ^ 436 Altman D, 2001, ``Rupture or continuity? The internationalization of gay identities'', in Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections Ed. J C Hawley (State University of New York Press, Albany, NY) pp 19 ^ 41 Bacchetta P, 2002, ``Rescaling transnational `queerdom': lesbian and `lesbian' identitary-positionalities in Delhi in the 1980s'' Antipode 34 937 ^ 973 Bejel E, 2001 Gay Cuban Nation (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL) Binnie J, 2004 The Globalization of Sexuality (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA) Carillo H, 1999, ``Cultural change, hybridity and male homosexuality in Mexico'' Culture, Health and Sexuality 1 223 ^ 238 Chao A, 2000, ``Global metaphors and local strategies in the construction of Taiwan's lesbian identities'' Culture, Health and Sexuality 2 377 ^ 390 Chong K T, 2001, ``Transcending sexual nationalism and colonialism: cultural hybridization as process of sexual politics in '90s Taiwan'', in Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections Ed. J C Hawley (State University of New York Press, Albany, NY) pp 123 ^ 137 Chou W-S, 2001, ``Homosexuality and the cultural politics of Tongzhi in Chinese societies'' Journal of Homosexuality 40 27 ^ 46 Chow R, 1993 Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN) Crang P, Dwyer C, Jackson P, 2003, ``Transnationalism and the spaces of commodity culture'' Progress in Human Geography 27 438 ^ 456 Cruz-Malave A, Manalansan M (Eds), 2002 Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York University Press, New York) Donham D, 1998, ``Freeing South Africa: the `modernization' of male ^ male sexuality in Soweto'' Cultural Anthropology 13 3 ^ 22 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2003, ``Sexuality and space: queering geographies of globalization'' (special issue) 21(4) Grewal I, Kaplan C, 2001, ``Global identities: theorizing transnational studies of sexuality'' GLQ 7 663 ^ 679 Hanawa Y, 1994, ``Guest editor's introduction'' positions 2 v ^ xi Hayes J, 2000 Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL) Hoad N, 1999, ``Between the white man's burden and the white man's disease: tracking lesbian and gay human rights in Southern Africa'' GLQ 5 559 ^ 584 Hoad N, 20008,``Arrested development or the queerness of savages: resisting evolutionary narratives of difference'' Postcolonial Studies 3 133 ^ 158 Jackson P A, 2001, ``Pre-gay, post-queer: Thai perspectives on proliferating gender/sex diversity in Asia'' Journal of Homosexuality 40 1 ^ 24 Klein C, 1999, `` `The ghetto is over, darling': emerging gay communities and gender and sexual politics in contemporary Brazil'' Culture, Health and Sexuality 1 239 ^ 260 Knopp L, Brown M, 2003, ``Queer diffusions'' Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21 409 ^ 424 McLelland M, 2000, ``Is there a Japanese `gay identity'?'' Culture, Health and Sexuality 2 459 ^ 472 Manalansan M, 1997, ``In the shadows of Stonewall: examining gay transnational politics and the diasporic dilemma'', in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital Eds L Lose, D Lloyd (Duke University Press, Durham, NC) pp 485 ^ 505 Manalansan M, 2003 Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Duke University Press, Durham, NC) Murray A, 2001, ``Let them take ecstasy: class and Jakarta lesbians'' Journal of Homosexuality 40 165 ^ 184 Nast H (Ed.), 2002, ``Special issue: Queer patriarchies, queer racisms, international'' Antipode 34 835 ^ 844
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