*Area Impossible* refuses the assumption that queer theory belongs to the West and applies everywhere else. Arondekar and Patel stage a collision between queer studies and area studies—and in that collision, ‘area’ stops being just geography. It becomes a tool for critiquing empire, capital, the machinery of the state itself.
The collection maps sexuality across South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean—places where desire and identity got recorded in the margins of labor contracts, indenture documents, colonial legal codes. The archives weren’t built to capture sexuality. They were built to track bodies as property, as debt, as resources. But sexuality is there anyway, visible in the gaps and silences, in what the documents couldn’t quite eliminate.
The subjects sprawl across registers: Dalit religiosity. Trans theater. Debt bondage genealogies. Each one refuses to fit into the framework of liberal rights that Western queer theory depends on. Not because they’re ‘backwards’ or underdeveloped versions of Western queerness, but because they emerged under completely different conditions—colonialism, indenture, dispossession. The desires that survived those conditions don’t look like American sexual identity politics.
The work’s real intervention is in provincializing Western models. Making them local, contingent, limited. And in doing that, it uncovers genealogies of desire that never needed the language of ‘rights’ or ‘identity’—they existed as survival, as refusal, as ways of being that the state’s categories could never quite contain. Those genealogies matter. They’re not lesser versions of queerness. They’re different architectures entirely.
Details
| ISBN: 9780822368410 |
| Subtitle: The Geopolitics Of Queer Studies (Journal Of Lesbian And Gay Studies) |
| Genre: LGBT Studies/Social Sciences |
| Subject(s): Human Geography; LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies; Politics & Government; Politics & Social Sciences; Social Sciences |
| Publication Date: 2016-04-30 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Duke University Press Books |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 175 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: This is a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Volume 22, Number 2), edited by Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel. It is a significant academic work in queer and lesbian studies, focusing on the intersection of geopolitics, sexuality, and area studies. |
| Book_ID: 105925 |