1Traversing the terrain of queer studies and its implication in discussion of universalism, this essay offers a reassessment of queer in its over-reliance on global North knowledge and world-making that attain and uphold the status of constituting the universal. Through a wilful alignment with decolonial theorisation that eschews a singular western narrative of origin, reproduced in the automatic ascription of queer worldmaking and parentage to the geopolitical West, it reflects upon universal/particular, global/local, north/south and other entrenched binaries in queer knowledge-making regimented by imbalance of power. In this regard, it attempts to unsettle existing skewed analytics that disregard the coloniality of the queer white universal emanant from processes of racialisation, migration and border regulation. Aligning queer to universal might appear as an incongruous and over-ambitious exercise. However, in this essay, I demonstrate that explicitly forging the connection brings to the fore the processes of knowledge-making and trajectories of epistemological circulation. In queer theorisation these circulations affirm established colonial routes of knowledge-flow. Developing from geopolitical west’s engagement with queer formations, queer becomes a mode of being, thinking and knowing the world that demands replication and subservience from the West’s “others,” circumscribing populations from the global South into a teleological narrative of progress and development in which individual queer rights materialise as a measure of humanity. This essay therefore addresses the routinised construction of queer as the radical anti-normative in the West to insist on the faultlines of proclamations to radicality, even as queer functions within regulatory regimes of biopower subjected to conventional exclusionary practices. Underscoring an intersecting approach of crossing queer theorisation with decolonial thinking, it analyses queer entanglements in discursive formations of human rights, universalism, knowledge-making and dissemination, and North-South inter-relations. In so doing, it participates in renewing the scope of queer studies, orientating it as a discipline to reckon with its own coloniality. As such, in this essay, broadening its remit allows queer to circulate beyond the bounds of sexualities and genders as well as the universal/particular binary.
2Queer and its multiple manifestations do not constitute a western category even though queer studies as a discipline was instituted in western universities owing to the hegemony of western university framework with near-absolute excision of other systems of thinking and knowledge-making. In the initial years of queer theorisation, Eve Sedgwick reminded us that “our understanding of gay origin, of gay cultural and material reproduction” is sutured to the “plural” and the “multi-capillaried” (1990, 44). The plurality, in Sedgwick’s allusion, signals the axiomatic substance of human difference and acknowledgement of multiple modes of experiencing queerness. This essay connects Édouard Glissant’s conceptualisation of relational human difference, which eschews a monolithic Western, Christian narrative of origin as the sole formation of human interdependence, to Eve Sedgwick’s insistence on plural narratives of gay/queer origins and existence. It is the inter-connectedness of queer to other modalities of existence that the titular phrase “queer entanglements” references in this essay. Entanglements, as Walter Mignolo proposes in an interview, “take place in a power differential” such that co-existing and coeval formations of knowledge become categorised into universal or local conforming to “colonial epistemic and ontological difference” (Gaztambide-Fernández 203). This essay, in articulating queer entanglements in the contested site of universalism, attends to specific modes of queer epistemologies that circulate between global Norths and Souths and that concurrently replicate and construct inegalitarian regimes of power.
3The multiple crises pertaining to the term “universalism” produced in the second half of the twentieth century defy the logic of critique since they address, in a substantive manner, the exclusive/exclusionary impulse of how the term gives meaning to the imbalance of power in contemporary times. The contestation of an abstract universal humanity founded during the European enlightenment period coeval with Eurocolonialism, enslavement, consolidation of racialisation and exploitation has allowed nuanced discussions to signal the exclusive/exclusionary quality of universalism. Both Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter encourage a radical fracture in episteme such that “a new language and a new humanity” (Fanon 28) sever themselves from “purely naturalized modes or genres of humanness” (Wynter 18) that the geopolitical west imposed transnationally as universal. The refusal of the logic of critique undergirds engagement with universalism on its own terms, highlighting that the West arrogates to itself the origin and conceptualisation of the universal, which excludes the global majority populations as rational human beings or capable producers of knowledge. As Mary Louise Pratt asserts, it is the logic of interpretive power that a “monopolistic use of categories” ascribes to Euro-US the origin and legacy of universalism, that of modernity and rationality (38). Additionally, as Souleymane Bachir Diagne borrowing from Seloua Luste Bulbina reminds us, it constitutes a critique of a particular conception of the universal that colonised “in the name of the Universal” (2013, 7). As such, it is towards the abstraction of the term and the production of exclusions that the crises relating to the term “universalism” direct our critical focus.
4One other engagement with universalism in/as crisis concerns addressing the category of difference. The Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant figures as the most celebrated thinker who decried the deployment of the term “universal” as a self-referential abstraction in European thinking. Arising from and thinking through the ocean and its abyss that incorporates the Euro-American Atlantic enslavement economics, Glissant inserts human relationality in Euro-philosophical thinking about universalism and humanity. Without proffering a resolution to debates on universalism, Glissant’s idea of Relation implicates human difference as part of the Whole-World, which generates “knowledge of the Whole, greater from having been at the abyss and freeing knowledge of Relation within the Whole” (8). As Angela Brown avers, “the call to remember all the differences in the world is, for Glissant, a pivot away from the romantic (often nostalgic) abstractions of universal thinking and towards a totality made up of finite and, perhaps more importantly, knowable relations” (1). Arguably, Glissant connects difference to multiple as opposed to a singular western narrative of origins operating as a fixed, declarative “generalizing universal” (14; see also Wynter’s critical review of a purely biocentric macro-origin story, 16). Contrary to such originary fixities, Bachir Diagne follows Glissant’s thought to consider originary syncretism and inherent cultural pluralism as an expression of universal modes of epistemological formation. Drawing nuanced distinctions between ‘universal’ and ‘universalism’ as that which relates to the plurality of human existence and co-presence and that which marks the declaration of a “particularity to be universal” (Bachir Diagne 2020, 21), Bachir Diagne’s engagement extends Glissant’s undermining of Eurocolonial imposition of universalism, an ‘out-of-date universalism’ (23).
- 1 Compare the account of white supremacy as the contemporary political dominant in the works of Charl (...)
5Both Glissant and Bachir Diagne emerge as constructing blocks for discussion on crises traversing universalism. In this regard, Julien Suaudeau and Mame-Fatou Niang’s instructive exegesis in their long essay titled Universalisme (2022) points to the operational exclusions in the deployment of universalism as articulated in the national imaginary. What they term “pseudo-universalism” regulates national community based on a Eurocentred reading of history, forged in the Enlightenment era, which countenances scant critique. It becomes a concept reduced to a doctrinal frame to reinforce colonial amnesia and relegates racism to a distant past resulting in evacuating the requirement for an antiracist commitment (32-38). Further, as decolonial theorisation instructs us, the establishment of this particularised form of pseudo-universalism was foundational not solely to colonial conquest but was in equal measure fuelled by pseudo-scientific theories of race that have an enduring legacy—coloniality—in terms of racialisation and racialised typecasting in contemporary times (Mignolo; Quijano). The exclusive/exclusionary universal therefore operated and still operates as a “white possessive,” to loan a term from the Indigenous Australian scholar Aileen-Moreton Robinson, “the logic of possession” by the geopolitical West that passes for “invisible” but is “hypervisible” (xiii) in maintaining the hierarchised relations enacted by “l’ordre blanc” (Suaudeau and Niang 74).1 This imposition is illustrative of a “provincialism as universalism,” a “pretension” of universal rationality reifying the “specific cosmic vision of a particular ethnie […] called Western Europe” (Quijano 84).
6Whilst coloniality of power operates as one of the significant markers of Eurocolonial legacies through its defining and ‘definitive’ imbalance of racialised hierarchies (Quijano 87), the exclusive/exclusionary universal formation that it generates impacts all global relations. It negatively affects the totality of being in the global Souths that remain outside the purview of universal sensing and knowing, constructing instead “multiple hierarchical dimensions of social life (e.g., racial, sexual, gender, economic, political, family, knowledge structures)” (Tamale 29). Even though the professed objective of the Eurocentred universal announces committed investment in the ‘human’, its overinvestment in the western bourgeois white ethnoclass (Wynter) remains absolute. Per Fanon, the Eurocentred universal is “never done talking of Man, yet murder[s] men everywhere” (251). Emanating from such a skewed and partial discourse, the Eurocentred universal constructs the discourse of human rights emplacing the global North at its core, which inevitably produces the outcome of first-in-the-West-then-the-rest teleological narrative, akin to the singular originary narrative of our planet. The geopolitical West sustains, in this scheme and in Fanonian terms, a “permanent dialogue” of “obscene narcissism” with itself (253). In terms of racialised hierarchies, the imbrication of human rights in a “matrix of biopower” creates “a universal discourse of individual human rights [indexed on] the prerogative of collective white possession” (Moreton-Robinson 131). Further, despite the multi-site trajectory of human rights in its universal iteration, the dominant template imposed in the global perspective remains that attached to the geopolitical West, circumscribing collective rights of human and non-human planetary co-existence. Walter Mignolo (2021) queries the formulation of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights that were written into existence “to correct the errors and mistakes made by a handful of western European states and the US” (256). For Mignolo, the conception of communal living rights entails reorienting the discussion to the origin of human rights (both when and why of their invention) along with how westernisation became an inexorable imposition. Asserting the significance of communal living rights (254), Mignolo critiques the “imperial rhetoric of modernity” (255) that conceals the universal from universalism itself by denying the humanity of “others” and projecting pre-emptively the violence onto others that one is capable of and that one has enacted in history. In a similar manner, postcolonial human rights discourse and postcolonial universalism emerging from the Third World prompted by opposition to colonialism foreground the case of collective human rights of communities, peoples and cultures (Suaudeau and Niang; Bachir Diagne). The shift in the trajectory of human rights and universalism appears in a bind of relational dialogue of human difference across disparate geo-locations, such that, they belong to everyone and no one in particular and appear neither as an exclusionary command nor injunction (Suaudeau and Niang 62).
7Within queer theorisation, anti-normativity has emerged as a predominant characteristic in the western academy such that dissociations from it, even minor variations, remain largely ordained to the peripheral. Even so, in the initial years of formalisation of queer studies, David Halperin, for instance, described the nascent politics of queer as swiftly becoming “a positionality vis-à-vis the normative” (62). The accentuated attachment to opposing default normativity of social and political relations has emerged as the critical purchase of queer studies. The multiple conceptualisations have sought to define the contours of the field through a sustained challenge to an unstable but socially rooted norm, that of heteronormativity and its associations with hierarchy and propriety (Berlant and Warner 548). Terms such as, ‘homonormativity’ and ‘cis-normativity’ have impelled resistance to institutionalisation of power hierarchies founded and structured around a/the norm such that the queer universal emerges as another iteration of queer anti-normativity. In the last two decades, however, scholarship has confronted the over-investment in anti-normative positionality to re-assess the normativity of the queer-as-antinormative narrative as a universal and “field-defining rule,” reflecting upon “the pursuit of queer theory without antinormativity” (Wiegman and Wilson 2, 20). The interaction with anti-normativity in myriad forms has resulted in both incisive critique from trans* theorisation and direct interrogation from queer of colour critique. For instance, Cáel Keegan articulates the exception of trans* epistemology within frameworks of feminist queer studies’ emphasis on anti-normativity that inexorably eschews an adequate engagement with specificities of trans* studies’ contribution (393). In a similar vein, queer of colour critique scholars, such as Roderick Ferguson, interrogate the existence of racialised queer subjects within queer theory’s ambit given the complex histories of racialised sexual formations that locate them as being “eccentric to the normative” (26). It is in this regard that the influential call for the renewal of queer studies by David Eng, Jack Halberstam and José Muñoz in 2005 considered the white gay and queer subject as representing the core of queer anti-normative discourse through “mechanisms of normalization” (Eng et al 4).
8Queer anti-normative as normative operates perfunctorily as entanglements of universalism largely figuring in three frameworks of social formations, i.e., as North-South circulation of knowledge, as continuation of coloniality of race and power, and as interventions in human rights discourse. In what follows, I detail the characteristics of each entanglement. Overall, queer entanglements of universalism constitute a by-product of universal/particular discussions that animate human interactions globally. In line with a Eurocentred universal, global North queer ways of being (anti-normative) function as a colonial site of privilege, interpreting and imposing the particularism of Euro-US queerness as universal queerness. Western cultural (re-)productions of queerness exercise a universal presence in both global Norths and Souths, disregarding the multi-route formation of queerness in disparate geolocations. The coloniality of the queer universal develops through modes of being queer, dictating a sequence of queer ways of existing in the world. For instance, the coming out of the closet operates as an injunction for the fulfilment of any queer life, often in disregard of the invitation to violence for queer subjects located in regions where same-sex consensual acts are under criminal bind. The global South is corralled into a teleological relationship with the global North as the leader of queer universalisms, similar to human rights discursive formation of imposed westernisation. Queer entanglements, in this manner, reference the ubiquity of western narratives in formations of gender and sexuality discourses transnationally. Such formations are deeply embedded in enduring histories of territorial conquest, obliteration of non-white/non-western ways of being, doing and knowing, especially forms of sexualities and genders that remain illegible to colonial administrators. Queer theorisation from the global North remains largely immune to engagement with sexualities and genders from the global souths. With respect to racialisation in the global north, queer of colour critique extends queer and transnational feminist analyses to focus on the limitation of anti-foundational and anti-normative queer studies, which, as Ferguson evinces, insufficiently engages with “intersecting saliency of race, gender, sexuality, and class in forming social practices” (4). Queer entanglements of universalism therefore bring into focus race, migration, sexualities, national affiliation and north-south circulations of knowledge, inter alia, to implicate human difference into collective formations of co-existence.
9The pluralism intrinsic to our planetary existences invites us to conceive of queer theorisation as a multi-site, multi-trajectory cultural formation, as “multi-capillaried” in the Sedgwickian sense as discussed above. Queer of colour critique signals the foundational absences of racialisation and migration amongst other processes in the political economy of queer studies even though racialisation “has helped to articulate heteropatriarchy as universal” (Ferguson 6). In comparative similarity, in queer and trans* mobilisation across geopolitical sites, especially in the global Souths, Euro-US universal impositions regularly prevail over local and particularised formations of gender and sexual configurations despite the extant relational diversity of the latter. Certain critical grammars of queerness in the global Souths, as Thamy Ayouch contends in the case of Moroccan sexualities, place scant emphasis on “sexuality” as a rigid identity marker since “sexuality is not a universal notion” (593). Emphasizing queerness—as though a universal queer subject operates in identifiable ways transnationally—becomes a North-South imposition in similar circumstances and results in, as Ayouch elucidates, the subalternisation of queer sexualities (597) from the global Souths due to interpretive registers of the norths. Nevertheless, intersecting local and transnational discursive grammars suture to queer theorisation and mobilisation in the global souths. For instance, the legitimacy of the term “queer” has become acceptable currency in majority of global South constituencies despite its not infrequent contestation. Multiple discourses entangle universal queer formations and local vernaculars of queerness in the global souths.
- 2 Bacchetta further suggests that the North-South circulations of theorisation and knowledge often “m (...)
- 3 Glissant labels cultural practices that remain unintelligible to the West as belonging to the realm (...)
10Regulatory queerness disallows the circulation of queer knowledges originating in the global Souths towards the north. Particularised iterations of western queerness and transness follow similar trajectories of hegemonic presence in lieu of an imbricated co-presence. Queer knowledge instituted through queer studies in global North universities “maintains a stranglehold on knowledge production [via] an elaborate publication infrastructure” (Tamale 281), enacts erasures of local knowledges from global souths and upholds the rule of western monopoly of universal queerness through institutionalised reproduction ad infinitum. Such circulations create, as Paola Bacchetta states “unidirectionality and unevenness of ideological flows from the global North(s) to the global South(s) (576).2 Circumscribed in such North-South queer particularisms, queer iterations from the global souths as both cultural practice and knowledge-making are subsumed in a larger queer universal imposed by and legible to the global North. In several ways, knowledge becomes fragmented since either resources and energy are deployed and disoriented in resisting particularised forms of queerness. For instance, global south feminists’ contestation of “simplistic outdated arguments” produced as part of western coloniality (Tamale 4), or non-translatable queer cultural formations remain peripheralised.3
11The queer anti-normative universal, tethered to useful and ground-breaking distinctions of gender, sex and sexuality, conforms to regulatory regimes of queerness that are guarantors of reproducing imbalance of power between diverse geolocations. As outlined above, several intersecting frames emerge in the appropriation of queer worldmaking in global souths. For instance, local terms such as hijra, kothi or kinnar, employed to reference a diverse array of feminine-identified gender-variant and/or sexual-variant subjects in India, co-exist and overlap with prevalent transfeminine vocabulary of western cultural spheres. The crossing of local and global queer lexicon invariably produces an inclusive, and more significantly, an expansive system of identification. In relation to the legal framework of rights, it enables a wider remit of personhood as is the case in India and Nepal. However, as Aniruddha Dutta and Raina Roy assert, the “attempted universalization of transgender as a transnational umbrella term by the development (nongovernmental) sector, the state, and their funders” uncritically subsumes “South Asian discourses and practices of gender/sexual variance as merely ‘local’ expressions of transgender identity” (321). The inexorable occlusion of diverse configurations instantiate queer regulatory regime’s norms that depend upon and follow global inequalities of power.
12It is in the political economy of North-South circulation of queer knowledge that the primacy of western queer cultural practices, such as drag and its concomitant theorisation, materialise as universal templates. The outcome of the skewed exchange transnationally points to the production and reproduction of what Bacchetta calls “white theory” which is “colonial-and-race amnesiac” and which erases “subalternative theories and practices” (576). Within transnational feminist studies, scholars such as Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí (1997) and Sylvia Tamale (2020) have produced trenchant critiques of the universalising category of “woman” in African contexts and have argued that categorisation based on binary gender differentiation emanates from western discourses of gender. Tamale adds that sustained interest in researching African women in the 1970s “uncritically transplanted Western methodologies and biases” that were “universalistic and colonial” (48). Extending Tamale’s formulation, I suggest that global North queer and transgender cultural practices preponderate over local, diverse sexual and gender configurations of global souths in queer theorisation. In this regard, drag performativity has emerged as the universal critical grammar of gender and sex/sexuality distinction. Such theorisation obliterates subalternative genealogies of gender and sexual arrangements that have traversed both colonial and postcolonial periods in the global Souths. For instance, gender-variant groups of Punjabi women-only dance form called giddha in India have lately gained prominence both in terms of acceptance and presence. It is through the inherent queer feature (of gender and sexual crossing) in giddha that it has become possible to host gender-variant performers in heteronormative spaces of institutional marriage and rituals. Prescriptive theorisation of gender and sex distinction, emanating from the analyses of drag performances, does not allow a nuanced understanding of cultural economy on a global scale. As an art form, giddha operates both as a historically codified practice on occasions such as celebration of marriage, births, or seasons, and as a testament to women’s collective memory through recital of couplets and dance. Frequent interventions of gender-variant collectives, such as the Noor Zora group in the villages of Punjab and Punjabi diasporas in the west, attach themselves to critical genealogies of cultural practices. Interpreting these interventions as making sex/gender dichotomy visible or conforming to a strict sense of performance per se is an instance of grave misconstrual subtended by inegalitarian circulation of knowledge about queer worldmaking. They constitute, instead, culturally specific occurrences of opacity resisting a universalisable category of queerness.
- 4 Puar contends that the demand for same-sex marriage comprises concurrently a demand for equality, “ (...)
13Decolonial theorisation of race, following previous anticolonial thinkers such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, implicates global economic relations into racialised capital domination. Aníbal Quijano’s formulation of modernity/coloniality pivots on the centrality of “‘race’ as a phenomenon and an outcome of modern colonial domination” that, despite constituting a “blatantly ideological construct,” permeates the “history of the power relations of Eurocentred colonial/modern global capitalism” (85, 87). In addition, Quijano connects sex/gender binary (“western dualism”) to human taxonomies and processes of racial classification inaugurated during Eurocolonial conquests (87-90). Similarly, scholars of racialisation and sexualities forefront the collision of queer categorisation with race/racisms/racialisation and processes by which queer formations consolidate already existing racialised hierarchies of humanity. Borrowing from Rey Chow’s Foucauldian critique of biopower and Ferguson’s conceptualisation of queer of colour critique, Jasbir Puar deploys the notion of “ascendancy of whiteness” to provide an understanding of global queer politics (24). Whiteness as the universal and universalising norm produces, as Puar argues, the “figure of the queer or homonormative ethnic” who battles erasure in queer sites through processes of “dissociation or disidentification from others disenfranchised in similar ways in favor of consolidation with axes of privilege” (28). In my view, the ascendancy of whiteness in queer political sites constructs the white queer universal which reins in queer communities both white and racialised through the promise of sexual citizenship (marriage/partnership),4 access to reproduction and affiliation, same-sex adoption and homoparenting.
14The operability of the white queer universal hinges on the replication of racialised biopower in queer sites. White cultural practices appear as default universalised queerness to which all other global practices become subservient. Modes of being queer or typecast gay/lesbian, scripts of legibility such as coming out and visibility, and controlled definitions of queer vocabulary partake in the “micromanagement of information and bodies” to form a “knowable object” (Puar 25). The peripheralisation of racialised queer communities considered homophobic or as the subject of fetishisation, and/or queer practices from the global South constructs a polarisation within queer mobilisation. Akin to global enactments of biopower that confer certain privileges to stakeholders in whiteness (both white and racialised queers), white queer practices attain the status of being universal through its desirability as it represents access to power. In the process, it overlooks the guilt of shared complicities in the maintenance of global structures of inequality in return for inclusion in a global queer community. Simply put, subscribing to the white queer universal, a modality of power, ensures proximity and access to power for racialised queers.
15The vexatious problematic of human rights has invited renewed debates on their history and scope in transnational feminism and decolonial studies. For Walter Mignolo, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights forged during the Eurocolonial era defines the “imperial rhetoric of modernity” (255) and constitutes one portion of the narrative; the other being the newly independent nations in the second of the twentieth century whose relation to human rights was constructed through their experience of coloniality. The universal declaration in this context made the discourse of rights “individualised” in total disregard of “collective” relations in the formerly colonised nations. Human rights per se are not the subject of contestation. It is rather, as Mignolo debates (254-255), their allegedly European origin and formal institutionalisation of individual human rights over collective rights during the Eurocolonial period with disregard for colonial conquest and extermination of Indigenous peoples that requires critical scrutiny. In terms of non-Euro-US human rights discourse, in several parts of Africa, as Bachir Diagne (2013) and Tamale (2020) demonstrate, community rights prevailed over individual rights. Additionally, transnational feminists put into question western gender systems that individualise women’s experiences through universalising perspectives of monolithic patriarchy, espousing methods arising from epistemologies of “social individuality” as the unique possibility of human emancipation (Tamale 204). The essentialised model of “gender equality,” universalised through “planetary Western-centric civilization” does not achieve gender justice as such (Tamale 207). Pulverising the diversity of human communities through a uniformised category of “woman” and “rights,” human rights discourse underpins established hierarchies, disputed by decolonial feminists. Whilst Lola Olufemi defends “a refusal to trust that the language of rights can take us all the way” (48), Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso pleads for a radical “program of decolonization and disuniversalization of the women subject of feminism” (82). Relatedly, Ochy Curiel advocates for “deuniversalizing the subject ‘women”’ (478).
- 5 In the Conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon signalled the European injunction to “catch u (...)
16Continuing decolonial and transnational feminist theorisation, proponents of queer studies specialising in colonialism and sexualities urge for the dissociation of human rights and gay rights as units of measurement of human progress in the formerly colonised nations—several African and Asian nations witnessed the legal institutionalisation of homophobia, i.e., criminalisation of homosexuality during colonial periods. Queer entanglements of colonialism delineate the global north as a progressive/modern site of homosexual due to its visible queer mobilisation. In such interpretive frames, the global Souths/non-West embody, as Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin Manalansan observe, “a premodern, pre-political, non-Euro-American queerness” that follows western identity categories “in order to attain political consciousness, subjectivity, and global modernity” (5-6). Circumscribing global Norths and Souths in a scripted teleological narrative of progress serves the agenda of universalising individual human rights for queer communities without unsettling processes of racialisation and capital accumulation.5
17Queer interventions in the human rights discourse as a universal further allows the construction of the homophobic other, especially if they are Muslim and/or from Black or migrant communities. The polarisation bolsters cultural and religious difference that naturalises the radical exceptionalism of the global North as a site of emancipatory same-sex sexuality (see Puar 139). Patently, it allows the attribution of human rights preservation to Euro-US communities wilfully disregarding pinkwashing methods of tokenised queer asylum seekers as part of community fabric thereby obfuscating violent border and migration control. Further, relying on the language of queer rights, it has become commonplace to demand explicit condemnation of homophobia in Muslim-majority countries such as Iran, Afghanistan or Palestine. The injunction to issue statements specifying gruesome and violent details of homosexual rape and assault often potentialise as justification for land occupation and war. Importantly, the statements demand an uncritical humaneness devoid of complexity from communities already beleaguered by war and violence. Local queer and transgender mobilisation are, as in the case of alQaws in Palestine or activist organisation in Lebanon, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya or Uganda, routinely ignored despite immense relevance to local contexts. In this framework, it would be imperative to put forth the idea of decoupling of human rights and queer rights, founded on a “deuniversalising” of the queer subject, to loan from transnational feminist insights above. It is solely through transcending “exclusivist gay identifications,” as the queer Palestinian scholar Walaa Alqaisiya proposes, that “deuniversalising” sexuality as a “discrete site of oppression” can be achieved (29).
18This essay has queried the entanglements between queer discourses and debates of universalism, offering the premise that conceptions of universalism, human rights, queerness, gender and sexualities do not necessarily conform to clear monoliths nor to available categorisation of minoritising/universalising binaries. Through implicating decolonial feminist and queer articulations in current debates on universalism and its discontents, it has extended the discussion towards coloniality of power and its operations on genders, sexualities and processes of racialisation in the contemporary world. Neither have “western conceptions of gender” been central or “universal” nor have they been “a global phenomenon” (Olufemi 54). Their universalisation as with modes of being and knowing queer has materialised through dominant discourses that operate in tandem with (re-)production and dissemination of knowledge from the global North to Souths. The chapter has consequently attended to the processes that construct the analytic of queer as a particular cultural construct, i.e., the white queer universal and which appears as a modality of power when considered in relation to enduring geopolitical hierarchies.
19The plurality of our planetary existence invites us to reconsider the terms that provide meaning to our lives. Queer, in this chapter, allows a capacious reading of the “open mesh of possibilities, […] lapses and excesses of meaning” (Sedgwick 1993, 8). The relational turn in queer studies initiated by queer of colour critique, Black queer diasporic and decolonial queer studies, orientate queer theorisation towards possibilities of further entanglements in multiplying the significance of queer. Transcending the desire for the establishment of a universalisable individualised queer subject, the turn privileges imbrication of queer formations in processes of racialisation, migration, border control and north-south circulation of queer knowledge since several social categories have come into existence through Euro-colonially produced differentiation. It forefronts a renewed interpretive lens to deliberately link sexualities to categories of difference, beyond the regulatory regime of queerness itself. Queer entanglements in this chapter have considered the relation between communities, cultures and geopolitics as an integral part of describing how queer politics is relational and co-constitutive of multi-site knowledge of worldmaking. As Glissant would propose, a multi-region planetary co-existence requires participatory entanglement of the global North without recourse to “old impositions” (191). In sum, this chapter constitutes a plea for global inter-formations of queer relational co-existence.