Cuneyt Cakirlar reports on the Centre's recent symposium on Queer/ing Regions.
Since their paths crossed at NTU, Cuneyt
Cakirlar and Hongwei Bao were having conversations about their research and the
ways in which they respond to the contemporary scholarship on queer
globalization(s) and transnational sexuality studies. While collaborating with
students, activists, policy-makers, artists, filmmakers – whose work bears a
critical affinity with the growing trends of queer and LGBT activism in Turkey
and China, they realized that these “travels” were critically informing their
discourse of cultural translation between regions.
Cuneyt and Hongwei decided to
facilitate a dialogue between scholars whose practice contains
"regional" emphases in queer contexts. One of their inspirations was
Gayatri Gopinath’s theorization of the region. Gopinath questions how useful
regionality can operate as “a concept through which to explore the
particularities of gender and sexual logics in spaces that exist in tangential
relation to the nation but that are simulatenously and irreducibly marked by
complex national and global processes” (2008: 343). Thus, the main objective of
Queer/ing Regions has been to address the possibilities/potentials of a
critical "(self-)regioning" and thus to question the ways in which
the complex regional/local formations of sexual dissidence emerges as objects
of theoretical inquiry when situated within a global context by means of
academic and activist practice.
Exploring critically the "transnational" turn in
the second-wave queer scholarship which questions the global/ised intersections
between race, ethnicity, nation/diaspora, gender and sexuality, the symposium "Queer/ing
Regions" aimed to facilitate a critical intellectual exchange focusing on
the discourses of the "regional" in contemporary queer criticism. The
organizers attempted to revisit the critical potentials of reclaiming the
regional in queer critique. Rather than presuming the regional actors as passive
recipients of global flux, this conversation focused on the complex dynamics of
local/global systems in sexual politics. How can we understand transnational
formations of sexual subjectivities
without assuming a radical alterity between the local and the global, or
the west and the east? How can we understand the uneasy nexus of community and
sexuality in a global framework without avoiding to hear the voices of regional
actors? How can we identify modes of negotiation and contestation in the encounter
of the local sexual politics/practices with the Gay International?
The first session of Queer/ing Regions started with
Professor William Spurlin’s paper on the new forms of ‘queer’ writing emerging
in French from the Maghreb. Accounting for the historical influence of French
colonialism and Arab Muslim culture, Spurlin’s paper explored how “this new
writing (Eyet-Chékib Djaziri. Rachid O., Abdellah Taïa. Nina Bouraoui) has
created spaces specifically for the textual and social negotiation of new forms
of dissident sexuality and
regional belonging whilst simultaneously blurring received cultural
distinctions between gender-defined performances
of homosexuality (active/passive) and struggles for a sexual identity as a discursive position (hetero/homo) not merely
reducible to its manifestations in the West.” Following Spurlin’s talk, Howard
Chiang considered Sinophone studies as an emerging field that suggests a
conceptual framework exposing “where the liminal spheres of queer studies and
Chinese Studies overlap”. Chiang ended his talk with a suggestive rereading of
one of the most celebrated films in which homosexual experience in the PRC is
depicted, Lan Yu (2001). In the final
paper of this panel, Professor Richard Phillips shared his reflections and
observations on the workshop “Postcolonial Sexualities: Emerging Solidarities”
which he recently organized at the University of Sheffield. Phillips explored
matters of “empirical and theoretical predicaments”, “dispersed agencies” and
risks of “authenticity fetishisms” implied within discourses of the regional.
The second panel of the symposium hosted three geographers
who attempted to relate to the region-as-concept from within the disciplinary
foundations of geography. Gavin Brown suggested that queer studies (and lesbian
and gay studies before it) have periodically considered the role of political
economy in shaping sexual identities and politics, but has not engaged with
political ecology. “Mak[ing] a case for understanding sexual identities in the
context of resource consumption (and local ecologies) at various spatial
scales”, Brown’s paper argued that “the emergence of 'modern' gay identities in
the Global North largely coincides with the period of high-carbon consumption.”
Following this discussion, Silvia Posocco responded explicitly to the
organizers’ invitation to consider “discourses of the regional in contemporary
queer criticism”. Suggesting that “comparative
and regional might become
contradictory tools”, Posocco discussed some of the problems and possibilities
that open up “when one foregrounds the epistemological and political dimensions
inherent in how scale, relation and perspective are figured in queer analysis.”
Following Posocco’s inspiring paper, Jon Binnie referred to recent debates in
human geography on “the relational politics of scale, networks and assemblage
to pose questions of contemporary transnational queer studies.” Relying on his
recent empirical study of transnational activism on LGBTQ politics in Central
and Eastern Europe, Binnie suggested that “these debates can enrich debates on
the politics of space within transnational queer studies, by opening up new
agendas for a critical engagement with the region.”
In the final panel, building upon her previous research on
Shanghai's gay political economy, Camila Bassi explored the remarkable
phenomenon of the reality television show, "Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt
Super Girl Contest". Bassi made connections “between the socio-cultural
and the politico-economic aspects of the Super Girl phenomenon, in order to
fully illustrate the radical space that was created in China for an antihero
and lesbian identity.” Following Bassi’s discussion, Enda McCaffrey explored
shifting male homosexual practices in specific urban centres in the UK in the
1970s and 1980s. McCaffrey examined “how homographies of this period, set
against a unique backdrop of terrorism, military occupation and urban
segregation, stand out as traces of a queer ars
erotica that is integrative, relational and invisible, but which have been
lost to later hypervisible marks of gay identification.” The final paper of the
event was Bethan Stevens’ piece which offered a creative exploration of a queer
experience of travelling between Sussex, England, and Kigali, Rwanda, in 2007.
Attentive to small details, Stevens’ writing sought to show “how the local,
regional and global interact in everday life, sometimes in uncanny ways.”
We genuinely hope that the diverse multi-disciplinary
content of the symposium triggered inspiring and productive conversations, and
hopefully, an ongoing dialogue for further collaborations.
