Queer Diasporas

Queer Diasporas presents essays that explore how sexuality and sexual identity change when individuals, ideologies, and media move across literal and figurative boundaries. Speaking from a diverse range of ethnic, racial, and national sites, the contributors to this volume illustrate how queer identity in particular is affected in ways that are as varied and nuanced as the cultural, social, and physical environments themselves.

Incorporating literary analysis, ethnographic research, and theories of diaspora, migration, and transnationalism, the essays in this volume address an impressive range of topics, from the divergent medical and epidemiological understandings of the AIDS pandemic to 1950s lesbian pulp fiction. While one chapter focuses on the appropriation of religious ceremony by gay Filipino immigrants in New York City, another investigates the implicit connection between Jewishness and homosexuality in the work of Freud. The gendering of domestic roles in food preparation and consumption in Japanese society gives way to a discussion of Cuban and Jamaican homoeroticism as seen in the works of Reinaldo Arenas and Claude McKay. Chilean author D’Halmar’s orientalization of Spain as queer space and the hybrid nature of queer ‘zine culture in Quebec are the subject of others. The collection concludes with a monologue by “Walid,” a young gay Arab living in the occupied territory, whose sexual and national identities change according to his sexual and social needs.

Illuminating the complex nature of queerness in the postmodern world, Queer Diasporas contributes to the advancement of gay and lesbian studies. It will be important to those working in cultural, literary, and postcolonial studies.

Contributors. Michele Aina Barale, Daniel Boyarin, Sandra Buckley, Rhonda Cobham, Amir Sumaka’i Fink, Marcie Frank, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Sylvia Molloy, Cindy Patton, Jacob Press, Jennifer Robertson, Benigno Sánchez-Eppler