Universal Particularities

Abstract

As the numerous anthologies devoted to issues of sexuality and globalization attest, “queerness is now global” (Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan 1).¹ Self-identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people can be found in all four corners of the globe because they either live or visit there. Just because there is same-sex sexuality all over the planet, however, and just because certain cultures have the financial or ideological wherewithal to export their version of queer sexuality does not necessarily mean that queerness has the same meanings or manifestations for everyone. As Arnaldo Cruz-Malvé and Martin Manalansan argue in their introduction to Queer Globalizations, “while globalization is seen to liberate and promote local sexual differences, the emergence, visibility and legibility of these differences are often predicated in globalizing discourses on a developmental narrative in which a premodern, prepolitical, non-Euro-American queerness must consciously assume the burdens of representing to itself and others as ‘gay’ in order to attain political consciousness, subjectivity, and global modernity” (5–6). As the “non-Euro-American” qualifier implies, the premise of this and similar volumes is that “legitimized” versions of gayness are essentially extensions of the dominant cultures (i.e., those that are “First World,” white, Christian, etc.) from which they spring.