Gaga Feminism by J. Jack Halberstam

Author:J. Jack Halberstam [Halberstam, J. Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1099-0
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2012-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

HOW GLOBAL IS GAY?

While I found, on my trip to Indiana, that there is an extraordinary range to the meaning of heterosexuality in North America by region, by class, certainly by race (what are the connections between rural whiteness and beastiality, for example?), when we look at the ways that the US models of sex and gender get imported around the globe, we might be surprised to see how compact and simple, obvious and inevitable these classification systems can look. Even though homosexuality means one thing to a white gay man living in rural Indiana, another to an urban Latino in New York, and something else entirely to an Asian American lesbian in San Francisco, there exists a so-called global gay template for both sexual identity and social tolerance of sexual minorities, and these tend to be modeled on a fictitious but powerful fantasy of the United States. In this fantasy, gays and lesbians and trans people enjoy complete acceptance and live happily in same-sex relationships accepted by their parents and coworkers alike. This same fantasy compels people who feel persecuted elsewhere by restrictive models of sexual conformity to think of the United States as a sanctuary. It also has the unfortunate effect of homogenizing sexual systems around the world through the work of nongovernmental organizations and various other outreach groups.

In fact, as gender/sex systems become ever more complicated and unstable in Euro-American cultures shaken by precipitous declines in marriage rates and rocketing increases in divorces, altered from within by new gender systems and emergent sexual vernaculars, it is perhaps only the global circulation of Euro-American sex/gender systems that lends them any stability at all. What is wobbly and precarious at home looks sturdy and lasting when imported elsewhere; and so, as folks furiously debate gay marriage, gays in the military, and gay labor issues in the United States, “global gay” discourses transform contested categories and uneven political fields into stable identities and a politics of inclusion/exclusion. This often has the effect of imposing regulations onto pleasurably chaotic domains of behavior (cruising among men who may not identify as gay, for example) and substituting streamlined identity formations (gay, lesbian, transgendered) for extremely complex local organizations of bodies, desires, sex, and kinship, many of which are stratified less by sexual orientation than by, say, labor or age.

Let me give some examples. Some categories of gender variance, for example, in eastern Europe, the Middle East, and India and China allow for female children to be raised as boys where a family farm requires male rather than female labor, or where boys are so prized that a family with only daughters is at a distinct disadvantage. The New York Times, for example, in 2010 ran a story about girls whose parents dressed them as boys in Afghanistan. So elaborate was this phenomenon that there is even a name for such children in Dari: bacha posh. The girls who occupy this category enjoy greater mobility than their sisters and might access education more easily too.

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