Abstract: Around 1990 queer emerged into public consciousness. It was a term that challenged the normalizing mechanisms of state power to name its sexual subjects: male or female, married or single, heterosexual or homosexual, natural or perverse. Given its commitment to interrogating the social processes that not only produced and recognized but also normalized and sustained identity, the political promise of the term resided specifically in its broad critique of multiple social antagonisms, including race, gender, class, nationality, and religion, in addition to sexuality. Fourteen years after Social Text's publication of "Fear of a Queer Planet," and eight years after "Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender," this special double issue reassesses the political utility of queer by asking "what's queer about queer studies now?" The contemporary mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity--as a mass-mediated consumer lifestyle and embattled legal category--demands a renewed queer studies ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of difference, and calibrated to a firm understanding of queer as a political metaphor without a fixed referent. A renewed queer studies, moreover, insists on a broadened consideration of the late-twentieth-century global crises that have configured historical relations among political economies, the geopolitics of war and terror, and national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies.

Abstract: The political scientist Cathy Cohen has proposed that queer theory and politics be reconceptualized and made more relevant to the lives and struggles of "punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens."1 In speaking of--and on behalf of--punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens, and in asking where one might find them located within the political project of queer theory, Cohen does not simply challenge us to pay attention to previously ignored identities. Rather, in proposing the nonce taxonomy of "punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens,"2 Cohen attempts to interrupt the litigious process through which subjects petition for admission to queer theoretical attention and political concern. She proposes instead an antiauthoritarian process of subject formation closer in spirit to what, on the punk scene, is called D.I.Y., or do it yourself.3

Abstract: When I was six years old, my mother began filling me with horror stories to snap me out of my girlhood: If you don't stop acting like a girl and start being a boy, then we'll have to take you to the hospital and get your pee-pee cut off so that you can become a girl. I was appropriately terrorized by this threat: what six-year-old isn't scared of hospitals, knife blades, operations--especially on the tender private flesh between the legs? Apparently, my mother understood the cultural uses of castration. In "Medusa's Head," Freud suggests that a "terror of castration" occurs "when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother."1 The mother-Medusa barges into the boy's psyche and provides evidence of the castration threat posed by the father. Invoking the myth of Medusa, Freud then articulates how the threat and terror of castration are used to create a heterosexualized male subject: just as Medusa's victims turn to stone, the boy finds his penis hardened at the sight of the female nude. Thus castration is invoked in order to be debunked as fiction: the frightening Medusa, with her hair of snakes, is really "a mitigation of the horror, for [the snakes] replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of horror" (273). In effect, this mitigation is one that replaces the potentially lopped-off penis.

Abstract: Years ago now, writing about interactions between individuals and small-scale social groups, Pierre Bourdieu declared that strategies of power consist of "playing on the time, or rather the tempo, of the action," mainly through managing delay and surprise.1 Yet this chronopolitics extends beyond local conflicts to the management of entire populations: both the state and the market produce biopolitical status relations not only through borders, the establishment of private and public zones, and other strategies of spatial containment, but also and crucially through temporal mechanisms. Some groups have their needs and freedoms deferred or snatched away, and some don't. Some cultural practices are given the means to continue; others are squelched or allowed to die on the vine. Some events count as historically significant, some don't; some are choreographed as such from the first instance and thereby overtake others. Most intimately, some human experiences officially count as a life or one of its parts, and some don't. Those forced to wait or startled by violence, whose activities do not show up on the official time line, whose own time lines do not synchronize with it, are variously and often simultaneously black, female, queer.

Abstract: For me, queer studies has been one way to make this private, solitary, and inchoate feeling of being a fraud--a feeling that surges and subsides like a flare--into something like a critique. The feeling, it should be said, also erupts in gatherings of witty, edgy, and beautiful queer people. It is a more fundamental question of being, exploding when the decorousness of the normative, however indicated, becomes too much to bear.

Abstract: In Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, I attempted to advance a materialist interrogation of racialized gender and sexuality. I tried to do so by theorizing the genealogy of women of color feminism as inspiration for intersectional analyses of nonheteronormative racial formations. Aberrations used women of color feminism to provoke new considerations around the natures of culture and capital, new considerations that summed up in queer of color critique. It has since occurred to me that women of color feminism also invites us to consider how we might reconsider the issue of sexuality's deployment in an effort to assess queer studies' management of that category and to usher queer studies into its full critical potential.

Abstract: The sexual history of Asian diasporas is being written across nations, institutions, their publics. In this essay, I would like to speak about one privileged site and set of institutions in which the "sexual history" of the Asian diaspora is produced, organized, and subjected to regulation. That is, I would like to investigate the "history of sexuality" for Asian diasporas whose lines of dispersion cross U.S. space. What kind of "history of sexuality" is being written in this collision of diasporic groups and U.S. space?1 For nearly two centuries this collision has, in actuality, produced a genealogy of sex for both the U.S. nation-state and "modernized" diasporas. The "Chinese prostitute" consecrated by the Page Law of 1875 and the "Chinese bachelor" formed in the residue of successive Chinese Exclusion Acts from 1882 to 1943 are just some of the most famous figures to emerge from this collision. But I set my sights today on one of the newest figures to emerge from the annals of the sexual history of the sian diaspora.2 This figure, like his counterparts in previous historical periods, is to be found in the legal text and its supplementary genres, such as public health, anthropology, and psychology. The figure is named the "gay Pakistani immigrant," and he is found in immigration proceedings, juridical cases, and legal journals. Though murmurs of his existence have been heard before, and debate as to whether he was real continued for a number of years, he crossed a certain threshold of reality in the mid-1990s and emerged onto the legal, cultural, and social scene in an attire and voice fully suited to claim equal personhood at the table. And like his predecessors, U.S. immigration law remains the defining apparatus for his juridical and discursive constitution.

Abstract: These are queer times indeed. The war on terror is an assemblage hooked into an array of enduring modernist paradigms (civilizing teleologies, orientalisms, xenophobia, militarization, border anxieties) and postmodernist eruptions (suicide bombers, biometric surveillance strategies, emergent corporealities, counterterrorism gone overboard). With its emphases on bodies, desires, pleasures, tactility, rhythms, echoes, textures, deaths, morbidity, torture, pain, sensation, and punishment, our necropolitical present-future deems it imperative to rearticulate what queer theory and studies of sexuality have to say about the metatheories and the "realpolitiks" of Empire, often understood, as Joan Scott observes, as "the real business of politics."1 Queer times require even queerer modalities of thought, analysis, creativity, and expression in order to elaborate on nationalist, patriotic, and terrorist formations and their intertwined forms of racialized perverse sexualities and gender dysphorias. What about the war on terrorism, and its attendant assemblages of racism, nationalism, patriotism, and terrorism, is already profoundly queer? Through an examination of queerness in various terrorist corporealities, I contend that queernesses proliferate even, or especially, as they remain denied or unacknowledged. I take up these types of inquiries not only to argue that discourses of counterterrorism are intrinsically gendered, raced, sexualized, and nationalized but also to demonstrate the production of normative patriot bodies that cohere against and through queer terrorist corporealities. In the speculative, exploratory endeavor that follows, I foreground three manifestations of this imbrication. One, I examine discourses of queerness where problematic conceptualizations of queer corporealities, especially via Muslim sexualities, are reproduced in the service of discourses of U.S. exceptionalisms. Two, I rearticulate a terrorist body, in this case the suicide bomber, as a queer assemblage that resists queerness-as-sexual-identity (or anti-identity)--in other words, intersectional and identitarian paradigms--in favor of spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and rearrangements. Queerness as an assemblage moves away from excavation work, deprivileges a binary opposition between queer and not-queer subjects, and, instead of retaining queerness exclusively as dissenting, resistant, and alternative (all of which queerness importantly is and does), it underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations. Finally, I argue that a focus on queerness as assemblage enables attention to ontology in tandem with epistemology, affect in conjunction with representational economies, within which bodies, such as the turbaned Sikh terrorist, interpenetrate, swirl together, and transmit affects to each other. Through affect and ontology, the turbaned Sikh terrorist in particular, I argue, as a queer assemblage, is reshaping the terrain of South Asian queer diasporas.

Abstract: What does it mean to claim a space for queers of color in the global city of New York?1 How do queer communities of color stake out a territory beyond ghettos and enclaves and beyond demarcated moments such as Pride Days and ethnic celebrations? These questions haunt the struggles, rituals, and practices of African American, Latino, and Asian American queers as they engage with the travails of urban life today.2 Yet, despite the centrality of the city as the site of queer cultural settlement, imagination, and evolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, larger economic and political forces have increasingly and vociferously shaped, fragmented, dispersed, and altered many queers of color's dreams and desires.3 These forces can be traced to the emergence of post-Fordist capitalism and its concomitant neoliberal policies and are most palpable in cities worldwide.

Abstract: Since 9/11, South Asian racialization in the United States has taken place through curious and contradictory processes. Even as the "indefinite detentions" and deportations of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians continued unabated, the last three years saw an explosion of interest in Bollywood cinema among non-South Asian audiences.1 In March and April 2004 alone, major stories about Bollywood's moment of "arrival" in the West appeared in quick succession in Time Out, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, to name just a few of the most visible instances of media coverage.2 How can we account for this heightened visibility and "discovery" of Bollywood cinema at precisely the moment when South Asian communities in the United States are being more intensely surveilled, policed, and terrorized by the state than ever before? The stark contradiction between representational excess and material violence became particularly apparent to me during the 2004 Republican National Convention, as I found myself flipping through television channels hoping for some coverage of the massive protests in New York City. I came across the incongruous sight of protesters confronting a rather befuddled group of North Carolina delegates as they emerged from the latest Broadway show, none other than Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bollywood extravaganza, Bombay Dreams. The show was apparently a hot ticket among the RNC delegates, and its tag line--"Somewhere You've Never Been Before"--provided a colorful backdrop as the camera captured delegates admonishing protesters for preventing the police from doing their job of "keeping America safe." It seemed particularly ironic to me that the delegates occupied themselves inside Madison Square Garden with xenophobic calls for a never-ending "war on terror" while they diverted themselves outside the Garden with a brief foray into Bollywood glamour. The juxtaposition of nationalist spectacle and Bollywood spectacle may initially appear unremarkable, in the sense that Bombay Dreams can be seen as simply another safely multicultural, "ethnic" musical aimed at middle American consumers. One of the show's producers, in fact, stated that she "views the show as a descendant of Fiddler on the Roof or The King and I, musicals with an ethnic milieu that have universal appeal."3 Yet I would argue that the ubiquity and popularity of Bollywood at this particular moment of U.S. imperialist aggression and global hegemony bears closer scrutiny, as it reveals a great deal about the complex interrelation of multiple nationalisms and diasporic formations in the context of globalization.

Abstract: Queer theory is very particular about the kinds of trouble with which it troubles itself. The problem of race in particular presents queer theory with dilemmas over which it actively untroubles itself. I speculate in this essay on the resistance within establishmentarian queer theory to thinking race critically, a resistance that habitually classifies almost any form of race studies as a retreat into identity politics. This defensive posture helps entrench institutionally the transparent white subject characteristic of so much queer theorizing. Queer theorists who can invoke that transparent subject, and choose to do so, reap the dividends of whiteness.1

Abstract: This essay was composed before eleven states--mostly red, but also blue--inscribed the cultural zeitgeist of homopanic into their state constitutions; before Ohio turned red and John Kerry conceded on 3 November 2004. Its tone is hopeful, forward-looking, one could even say devastatingly naive. Nevertheless, I hope that the project it initiates--reconceptualizing spatial imaginaries through the lens of a queer of color aesthetics and politics--can remain an important starting point for reconfiguring the representational strategies of our queer interventions in American electoral politics.

Abstract: When I first received an invitation to speak at the University of Michigan's "Gay Shame" conference, I felt immediately that this conference was not for me. The idea of gay shame felt anachronistic, even though I knew about the activist groups who organized under this rubric to critique the consumerism of gay pride festivals.1 The more I thought about the conference and its theme, the more I became convinced that gay shame, if used in an uncritical way, was for, by, and about the white gay men who had rejected feminism and a queer of color critique and for whom, therefore, shame was still an active rubric of identification. A quick glance at the list of participants a few months before the conference confirmed this notion, as at least seventeen white gay men were scheduled to speak out of a list of about forty-five participants and only a handful of people of color were listed for the entire event. I considered sending an e-mail to the conference organizers to ask about their understanding of the place of race in queer studies today, but I thought better of it and presumed that the list of participants was still under construction and would look very different when the conference began. As it turned out, the list of participants did change slightly; one of the queer people of color invited, Samuel Delany, could not attend, and so Hiram Perez was one of two people of color at the event who was speaking on a panel (as opposed to moderating a panel). At a conference where disability studies was given a panel all its own (and an excellent panel at that) and the scope of the discussion was supposed to extend beyond the university and into activist and performance communities, the omission of people of color, or at the very least of queers explicitly working on race, was ominous.

Abstract: In 1986 the United States Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of a Georgia statute under which Michael Hardwick had been charged with committing "sodomy" in his home with another adult male. The Court began its analysis by disavowing any concern with "whether laws against sodomy between consenting adults in general, or between homosexuals in particular, are wise or desirable." Rather, the majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick formulated its judicial task in the following blunt terms: to determine "whether the Federal Constitution confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy."1 The answer to that question could of course only be negative. An argument to the contrary was, in the Court's notorious phrase, "at best, facetious."2

Abstract: Something curious has happened over the past fifteen years. For queers, in the words of John D'Emilio, "the world turned," and now they are a central focus of mainstream politics and culture.1 Because of this increasing familiarity, queers are at once present and still despised. Gays--particularly white, affluent, stereotypical gays--experience visibility in shows such as Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy; homosexual sodomy has been legalized in the United States by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas; Massachusetts's highest court has ruled twice in favor of same-sex marriage, not civil union, rights; and renegade counties, towns, and cities in California, Oregon, New Mexico, and New York are defiantly marrying same-sex couples. But if the reelection of George W. Bush and the rise of values voters should signal anything, it is that we should hesitate to agree with the optimistic words of George Chauncey, who exclaimed, in the New York Times, that the battle for gay visibility has clearly "been won."2 We are visible, perhaps, but definitely not victorious.

Abstract: In June 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a landmark ruling that decriminalized consensual sodomy. Lawrence and Garner v. Texas protected the liberty to engage in "certain intimate conduct" as a dimension of a person's privacy and autonomy. Justice Kennedy, writing for the 6-3 majority, expounds on the constitutional meaning of liberty. He begins with the tenets of classical liberalism, that the state recognizes and makes visible the "dwelling," the "home," and "other private places" to protect "persons" from the state's own intrusive policing. And then Kennedy argues that this liberty and freedom "extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions."1

Abstract: Sexual regulation has played a crucial role in American politics over the last several decades. Here are a few snapshots of sexual politics in action: (1) in the summer of 1996, to establish his credentials for reelection, President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, a draconian "welfare reform" bill, along with a stringent "immigration reform" bill, legislation that placed sexual regulation at the center of a connected neoliberal agenda;1 (2) the impeachment of President Clinton based on charges of lying under oath about a sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky;2 (3) the remaking of the Republican Party over the last twenty years as an alliance between fiscal conservatives and social conservatives who do not share the same economic interests, yet are nonetheless willing to vote for the same candidate based on a mutual conservatism around gender, sexuality, and race;3 (4) the recent controversies over the role of moral values--values that the New York Times described only in terms of gender and sexuality--in the 2004 election.4