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Since the 1960s American and Western European gays have set the agenda for sexual liberation and defined its emergence. Western models of homosexuality often provide the only globally recognizable frameworks for discussing gay and lesbian cultures around the world, and thus Western interpretive schemes are imposed on non-Western societies. At the same time, gay and lesbian lifestyles in emerging countries do not always neatly fit Western paradigms, and data from those countries often clash with dominant Western models. So too, the literature of emerging countries often depicts homosexuality in ways which challenge the existing tools of Western literary critics.
The thirteen contributors to this book examine the implied imposition of a heavily capitalistic, white, and generally male model of homosexuality on the emerging world. By combining postcolonial and queer theoretical approaches, this volume suggests alternative frameworks for describing sexuality around the world and for exploring non-Western literary representations of gay and lesbian lifestyles. The volume concludes with a chapter assessing new questions in both postcolonial and queer theorizing that suggest common concerns and many avenues for future research.
List of contents
Preface
Global Gaze/Global Gays by Dennis Altman
The Perfect Path: Gay Men, Marriage, Indonesia by Thomas M. Boellstorff
Heavenly Creatures' Queer Sort of Fandom: The Closeted Indigene, Lesbian Islands and New Zealand National Cinema by Elizabeth Guzik
Im/De-position of Cultural Violence: Reading Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine by Benzi Zhang
Gender Crossing and Decadence in Taiwanese Fiction at the Fin de Siecle by Liang-Ya Liou
Racial and Erotic Anxieties: Ambivalent Fetishization, From Fanon to Mercer by Sonia Otalvaro-Hormillosa
Race, Class and the Homoerotics of The Swimming-Pool Library by James N. Brown and Patricia M. Sant
The U.S. in South Africa: (Post) Colonial Queer Theory? by Ian Barnard
Other and Difference in Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory by David William Foster
In Search of a Lost Body with Organs: Reclaiming Postcolonial Gay Interiority After Bersani's Reading of Gide by Christian Gundermann
Theorizing the Under-Theorized by Erich De Wald
Index
About the author
JOHN C. HAWLEY is Associate Professor of English at Santa Clara University. His previous books include
Reform and Counter-Reform (1994),
Cross-Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders (1996),
Writing the Nation (1996),
Through a Glass Darkly (1996),
The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam's Impact on Contemporary Literature (1998), and
Christian Encounters with the Other (1998).
