Possible Impossibles Between Area and Queer

Abstract

Area Studies has always seemed to me rather queer. Queer in the sense that language is queer: promiscuous and ranging, given to misfires and infelicities, promising to reveal more than it can access or represent. Queer in the sense that its objects are queer: messy and incommensurable, irreducible to identitarian categories yet occasioned by identity, boundaried yet open, unbounded yet self-referential. Queer in the sense that interdisciplinarity is queer: a knowledge project premised on the destabilization of its own objects, that points to the social, historical, and political construction of the disciplines between and against which its labors are situated. Queer in that it is anti-normative. Queer in that it is impossible. By that same token, Area Studies, that "hoary" Cold War-era "intelligence-gathering force for consolidating US power" (Arondekar and Patel 2016: 153) has always been and remains in need of queering. Queering, because those who study contemporary geopolitics and neoliberalism must attend to "the global expansion of normative society's modes of operation" (Tadiar 2016: 175). Queering, because the field's practitioners are called to "[work] with the difference of geopolitics through a notion of 'difference'" and in so doing to resist "any form of totalizing knowledge" (Arondekar and Patel 2016: 155). Queering because it does not consistently, in José Esteban Muñoz's description of the queer, reject "the here and now" and insist "on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world" (quoted in Taylor 2016: 210). "Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies" (GLQ 22.2) makes the case that Area Studies is queer and that it remains to be queered, while also positing Area Studies as a critical field formation with the potential to provincialize Queer Studies. The issue aims, in editors Arondekar and Patel's words, "to read the politics of queer and area studies as coincident-if not quite isomorphic-activities, to read both as heuristic practices that see form…as a placeholder that might partly express a promiscuous or incoherent desire or a desire whose content continues to be under erasure" (2016: 154). The articles, performance pieces, and aesthetic meditations assembled are consequently as interested in the signs by which they are occasioned as they are in such desires. Contributors engage with and disavow their key terms (e.g. if Taylor's "We Have Always Been Queer" owns its titular sign, then Macharia's "On Being Area-Studied: A Litany of Complaint," refuses to accede), while questioning how translated, untranslatable, and varied knowledges travel across fields. In the process, both Area Studies and Queer Studies are defamiliarized. The queer body, readers are reminded, is not just the sexed body, but the body dismembered by the US imperial war machine and recomposed with prosthetic appendages (Mikadashi and Puar 2016: 221). "Language, organism, and race can be areas, too" (Tadiar 2016: 180). Who, what, where and when-the issue attends equally to each interrogative-are the referents...

Queer of Color Critique

“…The way in which knowledge is produced is always caught up in certain histories and relations of power (Zalewski 2006). Therefore, we need to ask: How might we develop Queer of Color Critique that is not already American in its orientation and as a result does not reduce other geohistories and their subjects to mere case studies ( Srinivasan 2019)? How might we broaden Queer of Color's understanding of empire beyond the current assertion of US Empire and neoliberalism in order acknowledge various colonial legacies haunting different countries?…”