THINKING SEXUALITY TRANSNATIONALLY

Abstract

R e c e n t l y , there has been a small but discernible “transnational turn” in lesbian and gay studies and queer theory. Queer study groups on globalization have appeared at numerous universities and colleges, and a handful of national and international conferences have been held, including “Queer Globalization,” organized by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York in April 1998. This issue of GLQ is the outgrowth of one such initiative, a yearlong seminar on sexual identities and identity politics in transnational perspective that was organized in 1997-98, under the auspices of the Chicago Humanities Institute, by the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project of the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago.’ University of Chicago faculty had applied to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1993 for a grant to organize the seminar and three small related conferences, which proposed to examine the effect of the increasingly transnational mobility of people, media, commodities, discourses, and capital on local, regional, and national modes of sexual desire, embodiment, and subjectivity. The impetus for the yearlong seminar was a growing sense that transnational sexual diasporas were transforming the sexual politics and cultures of many nation-states. Postcolonial nations were witnessing the emergence of sex-based social movements whose political rhetoric and tactics seemed to mimic or reproduce Euro-American forms of sexual identity, subjectivity, and citizenship and, at the same time, to challenge fundamental Western notions of the erotic, the individual, and the universal rights attached to this fictive “~ubject.~’ New forms of “gay/lesbian” or “queer” identity, of sexuality, of intimacy, erotics, and community were emerging in these hybrid cultural fields and calling into question dominant

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