Sexuality and Contemporary Literature
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Sexuality and Contemporary Literature By Joel Gwynne and Angeli ...

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scholars interested in the representation of sexualities have had increasingly to analyze these in relation to migration, diaspora, transnationalism, and the ideological pressures of living amid different sociopolitical, racial, cultural, and religious contexts. Examining sexualities within a transnational critical framework has proven a particularly powerful and productive method. Ann Laura Stoler’s work on the (heterosexual) intimacies of empire, for example, has been seen as paradigmatic in this regard. Scholars have built on and extended her research, which focuses primarily on European and Western colonizers and native subjects, to consider sexuality transnationally in other ways, including examining the circulation of sexual mores intraregionally, mapping sexual relations between different colonized subjects within empire, and recuperating pre-colonial sexualities.2 One important aspect of adopting a transnational approach has been the attempt to destabilize the Eurocentric narrative of sexuality, particularly as this has been shaped by Foucault. This includes questioning certain commonly-held perspectives on sexuality, such as the entrenched “idea of a modern Western gay identity imposed on non-Western societies where a supposedly premodern gender is the salient erotic category” (Canaday 1255). According to Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, a transnational approach to sexuality should focus on “a mapping of different medical traditions, conceptions of the body, scientific discourses, and, last but not least, political economies of the family” (667) as part of staying alert to the ways in which the “global” and the “national” have set parameters around critical inquiry. In this respect, the idea of a queer diaspora is also especially enabling. As Gayatri Gopinath has written in her book, Impossible Desires, about queer female diasporic subjectivity, “a queer diasporic framework insists on the imbrication of nation and diaspora through the production of hetero- and homosexuality, particularly as they are mapped onto the bodies of women” (10). Queer diasporas enable movement beyond the sexualities allowable within conventional national and diasporic imaginaries, especially as these support the interests of global capital. These recent developments in the approaches to sexuality thus