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particular intersections of the macropolitical lines of imperial force and the micropolitics of affect and desire in historical subject formations. By highlighting these connections Mullen points toward a much-needed reassessment of the interpenetration of colonialism and sexuality, timidly adumbrated by Robert Aldrich in Colonialism and Homosexuality (2003).
Turning to Shyam Selvadurai in Funny Boy (1995) and Timothy Mo in The Redundancy of Courage (1991), texts that portray gay protagonists telling their own stories, John Hawley—who has already paid special critical attention to the queer postcolonial in, for example, Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections (2001)—shows that whereas Selvadurai allegorizes the Sinhalese/Tamil divide as a gendered question of boys’ territory versus girls’ territory, Mo echoes the Indonesian/East Timor conflict by utilizing a protagonist and narrator who is similarly torn.
In an essay in Queer Frontiers (2000), Peter Coviello surmised—after Susan Sontag’s intuition that “Apocalypse is now a long-running serial; not ‘Apocalypse Now’ but ‘Apocalypse from Now On’ ” (Sontag 88)—that in about November 1989, the concept of apocalypse changed and, by virtue of that change, all human relations have shifted. This idea brings full circle Virginia Woolf’s similar 1910 remark, referred to earlier in this introduction. Coviello further reasons: “[in 1989] the Berlin Wall fell; the Cold War … ended, and nuclear weapons … all but vanished” (Coviello 42). At that precise time, Coviello enthusiastically continues, the menace of AIDS unseated nuclear warfare as the defining apocalyptic threat to American health and security, a shift that shows how intimately bonded the nuclear and the sexual actually were, beforethe advent of AIDS gave to such bonding a ghastly quality of doom.
Given the sexualization of nuclear warfare—evident, for instance, in the naming of an atoll Bikini, destined to be visited by an explosive Little Boy—and all the sexual metaphors used by victorious perpetrators of war and violence, it is no wonder that in December 2003, “a few days after the capture of Saddam Hussein by US forces,” Paul Allatson received an e-mail containing “a JPEG that features the former Iraqi dictator sitting in