Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
...the book performs its work with exhilarating success. Since Hawley's afterword gives perspective to the collection--providing material that is more often in an introduction--this reviewer recommends starting there. Highly recommended for large university and public libraries serving upper-division undergraduates and above.Choice
Review
This collection uses postcolonial theory as a model for avoiding the imperialist tendency to imagine "gay" and "lesbian" cultures around the world in the image of white, upper-middle-class Americans and Western Europeans. It seeks to explore the often more fluid forms of same-sex attraction in other cultures, as expressed by their literature and film, without fetishizing or reductively translating them.American Literature
Synopsis
Examines the wide variety of sexual expression and self-description throughout the emerging world among men who love men and women who love women.
Synopsis
Since the 1960s American and Western European gays have set the agenda for sexual liberation and defined its emergence. But homosexuality is a global phenomenon, and gay and lesbian cultures around the world do not always neatly fit Western paradigms. This book investigates the implied imposition of a heavily capitalistic, white, and generally male model on emerging nations and suggests alternative frameworks for describing sexuality. By combining postcolonial and queer theories, the contributors to this volume explore diverse manifestations of homosexuality in the emerging world and the equally diverse literary representations of gay and lesbian lifestyles in those countries.
Table 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