Conjectures on the Sexual World-System

Abstract

This article brings together world-systems analysis, which explores how the world's capitalist markets became globally integrated, and sexuality studies for the first time in order to examine how the homo/hetero binary came to integrate and govern sexual organization throughout much of the world. Zooming out from the metropolitan and national frames that have dominated sexual historiography, this article operates at a different scale and order of magnification to explore forms of sexuality shared in whole and in part across the world. My theorization of the sexual world-system aims to understand the encounter between object choice as the organizing dimension of sexuality and its collision with other sexual knowledges and organizations: intimacy, bodily practice, positionality, sexual acts, behaviors, desires, and so forth. Reading across literary, sexological, legal, and religious archives, I examine the relationship between these varieties of sexual knowledge in order to contribute to a comparative study of sexuality and to write sexuality into what Immanuel Wallerstein calls “geoculture.”

Don't Ask, Won't Tell? Sexual Science and the Case Biography of Sodomy in Colonial India

“…In a recent essay, Benjamin Kahan speculates that a "sexual world-system" emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and was exported by imperial sexology to the colonies. 26 Integrating sexuality into Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems economic model and Franco Moretti's cartographies of world literature, Kahan argues that imperial sexology drew maps dividing the world into heterosexuals/homosexuals that became increasingly available to its margins. Briefly taking up the instance of India, and E. M. Forster's final novel A Passage to India, while charting sexology's world-mapping across several modernist literary texts, Kahan writes that unlike the cores of the capitalist sexual world-system, "peripheral zones function as sites of fantasy for the core with little or no engagement or knowledge of sexological discourses on the part of the inhabitants of these zones" except as its "unconsenting labor-power" ("Conjectures," 333).…”

Beside You in Time

“…Beside You in Time tells a story about the power of the timed body during the very long nineteenth century, a period that I first understood as a period at all through the history of sexuality. This period is bookended by the consolidation of discipline in Eu rope and its colonies on one side in the late eigh teenth century, and on the other, the somewhat belated consolidation of sexual identity in the United States after Eu ro pean sexological texts were translated and made available here-a consolidation not complete, if it ever was, until after the first third of the twentieth century (see Kahan 2017). Or, to put it more simply, I am interested in the period bounded on one end by the Eu ro pean prison/ factory/hospital in Foucault's Discipline and Punish and refracted in the experience of the Shakers that I discuss in chapter 1, and on the other end by the American gay bar that glimmers through the first volume of The History of Sexuality ) and Foucault's essay "Friendship as a Way of Life" ([1981] 1984) and that shows up in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood ([1936, the subject of my final chapter.…”

Resistência e ocupação de espaços: debates feministas e queer em relações internacionais

“…Para as Relações Internacionais, o queer é entendido como verbo (Queering International Relations), ou seja, busca ressignificar todas as compreensões anteriormente estabelecidas sobre o funcionamento dos processos globais. Um exemplo desse processo de ressiginificação é trazido por Kahan (2017) ao defender a existência de um Sistema-Mundo Sexual. Ao fazer uma releitura do trabalho clássico de Wallerstein (2011), Kahan acredita que há um modelo mundial que denomina a produção, transmissão, difusão e consumo do conhecimento sexual em âmbito internacional, regional e local.…”