Neocolonialism, queer kinship, and diaspora

This essay asks how configurations of family and kinship are rendered particularly queer in the context of diaspora, both for those who are part of the diaspora and for those left behind. It argues that the question of queer diaspora must develop a critical language for resisting the romance of family that subtends the liberal humanist paradigms of citizenship and activism; more specifically, it aims to expand the notion of queer diaspora beyond the specific conditions of same-sex desire in the framework of relocation, immigration, and exile, to suggest that queer diaspora provides a framework for thinking through the complicity of state policy, global neoliberal corporate regimes of exploitation and accumulation, and intimate mechanics of desire and attachment. In looking at Mootoo's and Danticat's work, I explore how the narratives of diaspora reveal a complicity between state violence and sexualized discipline – or rather, how ‘home’ and family become sites for the reproduction of state violence, episodes in which the enforcement of political power is privatized into the realm of the family and thus rendered natural, ‘private’, or invisible. The production of such subjects, I argue, involves the privatization of particular forms of labour as well as the public regulation of seemingly ‘private’ matters of desire, attachment, and kinship. Keywords: Kinshipqueer diasporaneoliberalismhome Notes Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Vintage, 1998). Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (New York: Grove 1996). This is a move marked by Elizabeth Povinelli and George Chauncey in their introduction to a special issue of GLQ, ‘Thinking sexuality transnationally: an introduction’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 5.4 (1999), pp. 439–449. Saulny, Susan. ‘Girls’ rescue from Haiti expands family by two', The New York Times (26 January 2010). Significantly, subsequent investigation revealed that many of the children flown to the USA were not, in fact, orphans, but were relinquished temporarily by poverty-stricken parents in the confusion and devastation following the quake. See Ginger Thompson, ‘Questions surface after Haitian airlift’, The New York Times (24 February 2010). David Eng, ‘Transnational adoption and queer diasporas’, Social Text, 21.3 (Fall 2003), p. 1. Eng, p. 1. Lisa Lowe, ‘The Intimacies of Four Continents’ in Ann L. Stoler (ed.), Haunted by Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 191–212 (206). Lacey, Marc. ‘Haiti Charges Americans with Child Abduction’, The New York Times (4 February 2010). I am reminded here of Janet Jakobsen's apt reminder that ‘the very idea of gay liberation – that which we are fighting for – contains within it the domination that we are fighting against, because the freedom enabled through the exploitation of wage labour is itself enabled by the dominative disciplines of sexual regulation. [Labour] Exploitation and [sexual] domination are not to separate problems ... they are both materially and ideologically intertwined’. See Jakobsen, ‘Sex + freedom = regulation: why?’, Social Text, 84–85, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2005), pp. 285–308 (291). Twila L. Perry, ‘Transracial and international adoptions: mothers, hierarchy, race, and feminist legal theory’, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 10 (1998), pp. 101–164. Reed Lindsay, ‘Haiti's excluded’, The Nation (29 March 2010), p. 21. David Eng, ‘Transnational adoption and queer diasporas’, Social Test 21.3 (Fall 2003), p. 2. I am indebted to Gayatri Gopinath's compelling work on queer diaspora and the feminist politics of home, particularly with regard to the limitations of the androcentric, cosmopolitan bias of much critical work on diaspora. Here I want to build on Gopinath's work to consider how ‘home’ functions not as a counter to diaspora but as a façade where the working-out of the politics of the state happen under the sanction of the private sphere. See Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Grace Hong provides an insightful reading of Mala's retreat to the natural world as it calls upon and contests the language of natural history to provide an alternative to the epistemological project of colonialism and the demands of reproductive heteronormativity. See Grace Hong, ‘“A shared queerness”: colonialism, transnationalism, and sexuality in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night’, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 7.1 (2006), pp. 73–103. See Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2001). Jodi Kim makes this point in reading the phenomenon of transnational adoption in the aftermath of the Korean War. See ‘An “orphan” with two mothers: transnational and transracial adoption, the cold war, and contemporary Asian American cultural politics’, American Quarterly, 16.4 (December 2009) pp. 855–880 (864)

Complicity · Diaspora · Kinship · Political science · Queer · Sociology · African history and culture studies · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Law