Unsettling the Patriot: Troubled Objects of Masculinity and Nationalism

Abstract

In his study of ‘globalising influences’ on Asian sexual identities, Dennis Altman argues that the internationalisation of gay identities should enable queer research ‘to question the extent to which the forces of globalisation (both economic and cultural) can be said to produce a common consciousness and identity based on homosexuality’ (1996: 79). Altman’s problematisation could certainly be taken into account while reading the global travel of a contemporary queer artwork that engages with sexual dissidence. However, what Altman calls the ‘global gaze’ (1997) should always be subject to negotiation and contestation as well as transfiguration. In this piece, I prefer to seek a way of interpreting regionally specific, regionally conscious artistic expressions of queerness or queer practice, where the notion ‘queer’ should reject an essentialising commonality based on universally fixed sexual identity categories. However, critiques of the ‘Gay International’ are also problematic in presupposing a radical alterity between the sexual epis-temologies of the West and the rest: the former is overinterpreted as monolithically imperialist and Islamophobic, whereas the latter is taken as a passive, overlocalised recipient, subject to any so-called western incitement to discourse (Massad 2002). Queer, in both cases, would still be a useful critical tool in terms of rethinking histories of sexuality and re-evaluating methodological approaches to contemporary sexualities that go beyond identity categories and an unquestioned East-West division (Traub 2008).