Description:
Uses postcolonial theory to critique the globalization of gay culture.
These thirteen essays address possible ramifications arising from the globalization of western notions of gay and lesbian identities. Examining postcolonial literature, economics, and psychology from a "queer" perspective leads to self-reflexive consideration of the canonization of postcolonial studies and queer theory in western academe.
Brief description: John C. Hawley is Professor of English at Santa Clara University. He has edited several books, including Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections and Cross-Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders, both also published by SUNY Press.
Review Quotes:
"Finally, the staging of an encounter between queer and postcolonial studies where neither term turns out to be quite distinct from the other and where a new mapping of fields becomes possible. The essays probe the possibility of thinking sexuality in terms of social normativity and globalization, making breakthroughs in several directions at once: history, sociology, literature, psychology. This is the kind of scholarship most needed and most productive: it opens up the question of an encounter through several sites in provocative ways without deciding the final form of the relationship between postcolonial, queer." -- Judith Butler, University of California at Berkeley