Sexualities, Transnationalism, and Globalisation

New Perspectives

Yanqiu Rachel Zhou, Christina Sinding, Donald Goellnicht, Yanqiu Rachel Zhou, Christina Sinding, Donald Goellnicht

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000382518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études du développement mondial

This innovative book explores the dynamic and contested interactions – including the mutually constitutive relationships – among sexualities, transnationalism, and globalisation.

Bringing together contributors with a variety of disciplinary, geographic, and theoretical perspectives, this text explores new theories and trends in sexuality research, including lived experiences of sexuality in this rapidly globalising world; changing relationships between sexualities, transnationalism, and globalisation; interventions, activism, and policy responses to the global challenges of sexual health; and relevant reflections on and implications for equity and social justice in the ongoing processes of contemporary globalisation. It is comprised of three sections, focusing on: transnational sexualities; transnational sexual politics; and transnational sexual activism.

Sexualities, Transnationalism, and Globalisation will be of interest to students and scholars from a range of disciplines and fields, including sociology, sexuality studies, anthropology, geography, international relations, politics, and public health.

1 Introduction

Yanqiu Rachel Zhou , Donald Goellnicht , and Christina Sinding

Let us begin with two recent stories about sexuality in this globalising world.

On May 24, 2019, Taiwan became the first, and remains the only place in Asia, to legalise same-sex marriage, albeit with limited adoption rights. Its legislature passed the bill by 66 to 27 votes, backed by lawmakers from the majority Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), whose leader is Tsai Ing-Wen, the first female president in Taiwan’s history. On May 24, 2017, the Constitutional Court had ruled that barring same-sex couples from state-sanctioned marriage was unconstitutional on grounds of discrimination and gave the government two years to amend the law. With government inaction and strong opposition from conservative and Christian groups, however, post-ruling progress was slow. In November 2018, Taiwan’s electorate passed a referendum refusing to recognise same-sex marriages in the Civil Code and restricting teaching about LGBT issues; of the 55 percent of eligible voters who participated in the referendum, 67 percent voted against marriage equality (Aspinwall 2019, LeDoux 2019, Leung 2019).

The second story, written by Peter Hessler (2019), a noted American journalist, concerns an Egyptian gay man’s transnational journey looking for asylum. Facing constant homophobic assaults, Manu, who had worked for Western journalists in Cairo, planned to seek asylum in Germany, which was perceived as a gay-friendly country. To ensure his success, he made a series of preparations, including getting a visa in Cyprus, establishing himself as a regular traveller by visiting other countries such as Saudi Arabia, exchanging his savings into US dollars, and securing an invitation letter from a conference held in Germany. Upon his arrival, with the help of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs), Manu quickly made a refugee claim and secured relatively private housing – one of three containers dedicated to queer refugees in a camp – in which he shared living space with five Iraqis who had fled war-torn rural areas and were uncomfortable with their homosexuality. A homophobic attack at the refugee camp soon made him as afraid as he had been back home. Unlike other queer peers in similar situations, but who were prevented from leaving by various settlement barriers, Manu’s resourcefulness and ability to learn German quickly enabled him once again to move, this time out of the camp, and to finally resettle in Germany as he had wished to do all along.

At first glance, both of these stories more or less repeat the archetypal, celebratory pattern of ‘migration to liberation’ (Murray 2014), or ‘queer globalisation’ (Altman 2004), in which the pursuit of sexual liberation and equity is made possible by the global spread of sexual citizenship or rights claims, as well as by transnational queer solidarity. Within this ‘geopolitical progress narrative’ (Wilson 2005), the rainbow flag – with its underlying ideals, values, and ideologies – has travelled from the West to the non-West, and the trajectories of the ‘others’ (for example, non-Western locales or racialised queer individuals in the South) largely trace the movement from oppression to freedom and from pre-modernity to modernity (Grewal and Kaplan 2001, Klapeer and Laskar 2018).

Looking beneath the surface, however, we can see other, very different and complex, stories. In the context of regional geopolitics, Taiwan’s story is not solely about the local success of transnational queer movements. Perhaps more important, it is also about how sexuality – as a form of political capital with global intelligibility – has become a key site of struggle by which Taiwan, as a ‘less-than sovereign nation-state’, has been able to gain global visibility and distinguish its (political) identity from that of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), notwithstanding the UN’s endorsement of the ‘One-China Principle’ and Taiwan’s own increasing economic integration with the PRC. For DPP as the ruling party, a local nationalist party in power only for the second time since the birth of Taiwan’s democracy, this bold move in a Confucianism-influenced society also serves as a strong expression of its nationalist aspiration and resistance to the hegemonic ethnocentric notion of ‘Chineseness’ (Liu 2010, Hu 2011). As well, the result of the aforementioned referendum suggests that the globalisation of rights claims does not necessarily annihilate the tensions and conflicts in local constructions and meanings about sexuality and underlying social attitudes.

The story of asylum seeking also reveals the gaps in and contradictions around global sexual citizenship. On the one hand, Manu’s ‘global queer identity’, enabled by his awareness of sexual rights elsewhere and his access to related cultural capital (for example, his own transnational networks, his ability to speak English and to learn German quickly, and his knowledge about various resources available to queer refugees), has made it possible for him to physically transcend the geographical boundary of his homeland and, later, the spatial boundary of the refugee camp in Germany. On the other hand, his transnational mobility as an Arab queer individual from the South was subject to the border policing regimes and his own capacity to navigate the German systems that have been overwhelmed by the recent ‘refugee crisis’. The story of his constrained mobility in a ‘borderless’ Europe also forces us to redirect our attention to ‘different kinds of boundaries that are crossed or that cannot be crossed, and by whom’ (Grewal and Kaplan 2001, p. 674), and to the changing conditions – discursive, material, geopolitical, historical, and institutional, for example – of global sexual citizenship.

These two examples reveal the nuances, complexities, tensions, and contestations embedded in the relationships between sexuality, globalisation, and transnationalism. Despite the globalising rhetoric of sexual rights, can we ignore (Johnson et al. 2000, p. 372) ‘both the different conditions under which “globalization” is occurring and the way[s] in which [such transnational] connections are made and imagined’? Or, put more simply, can we understand sexuality without understanding the dynamic global flows among sexuality, globalisation, and transnationalism? On the one hand, contemporary globalisation processes have generated new forms of experience and understanding of sexuality. On the other hand, sexuality as a social construct, intersecting with various forms of power structure (for example, history, geopolitics, economy, and social hierarchy) has also embodied, mediated, and challenged the logics, politics, and processes of globalisation.

In recent decades, research on sexuality in the context of transnationalism and globalisation has proliferated. Although the impacts of transnationalism and/or globalisation on sexuality have been widely discussed, the existing literature tends to treat globalisation (or transnationalism) as either a backdrop to or a lens for sexuality research. Less academic attention has been paid to the dynamic interactions – including the mutually constitutive relationships – between and among them. Related problems range from the reinforced marginalisation of migrant individuals’ sexualities in daily life to larger epistemic challenges, such as how sexuality – with its multiple politics, experiences, practices, and possibilities – has become an important site calling for research that goes beyond traditional, nationally bounded thinking (or, ‘methodological nationalism’), beyond normative or hegemonic Euro-American-centric perspectives and beyond the conventional conceptions of transnationalism and globalisation (for example, by paying attention to their temporal, cognitive, and relational dimensions).

In this edited volume, we bring together contributors with a variety of disciplinary, geographic, and theoretical perspectives in order to develop dialogues on the contested but mutually constitutive relationships among sexualities, transnationalism, and globalisation. Our aim is to explore new theories and trends in sexuality research, including lived experiences of sexuality, in this rapidly globalising world; changing relationships between sexualities, transnationalism, and globalisation; interventions, activism, and policy responses to the global challenges of sexual health; and reflections on and implications for equity and social justice in ongoing processes of contemporary globalisation.

In this introductory chapter, we first review the literature on sexuality in the contexts of transnationalism and globalisation, paying close attention to the conceptions behind three key words – sexuality, globalisation, and transnationalism – and the dynamic relationships among them. We also provide evaluative comments on the need to critically reflect on the imperial and colonial histories that haunt contemporary transnational processes as they shape sexuality and to understand sexualities by going beyond normative (such as present-centric, state-centric, Eurocentric, or North-centric) perspectives. After this, we provide summaries of the chapters, outlining the scope and variety of the topics in the edited volume. Collectively these chapters constitute the interventions the book makes in the field and advance new perspectives for conceptualising and critically examining the relationships among sexuality, globalisation, and transnationalism.

Sexuality, globalisation, and transnationalism

Empires, in their effort to define ‘levels’ of humanity and terms of citizenship within their territories, have long used sexuality as a technique of governance and enforcement, often in alignment with racist and gendered stereotypes (Stoler 1995, Boellstorff 2016). In the context of contemporary globalisation, the visibility of sexuality can be partially attributed to the emergence of HIV and AIDS in the 1980s. The US ‘AIDS crisis’ within gay communities in the 1980s generated widespread local activism and mobilisation around issues of human rights, sexual diversity, and equity and gave access to treatment and prevention (Quimby et al. 1989, Gamson 1990, Parker 2011). The global spread of HIV, in turn, led to the rise of transnational queer networks, the development of which was facilitated by the massive flow of international development assistance for HIV and AIDS (Puar 2001).

Between 1990 and 2015, for instance, the US government, the largest source and channel of development assistance for HIV, cumulatively provided $67.4 billion (58.5 percent of the total), followed by the UK ($6.7 billion), Germany ($3.5 billion), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ($4.2 billion since 1999) (Schneider et al. 2016). HIV, as an infectious disease that was initially conceptualised as relating to sexuality, has become a site of global sexual health interventions through the transnational – largely North-to-South – flow of resources (such as money, knowledge, and personnel), concepts (such as ‘men who have sex with men’, ‘LGBTQ’, and ‘safer sex’), and ideals (such as ‘sexual rights’, ‘citizenship’, and ‘modernity’). The direction of this global flow may also help explain the focus of knowledge production on the Global North and the predominance of Western scholars in sexuality studies (Coffey 2014, Kosnick 2016). Meanwhile, as a global pandemic heavily affecting marginalised groups and poor countries, HIV has also made its embedded social and economic inequalities, as well as the need for international solidarity, more influential in public policymaking (Altman 2008). In the 1990s, for example, while legal and moral concerns made the PRC government reluctant to work with some HIV-affected groups (for example, sex workers and queer communities), international/Western NGOs were allowed to enter the country to work with these groups, which benefited the development of queer identities/communities and helped reduce social prejudice (Kaufman 2012).

Global capitalism – in various forms – has played a crucial yet controversial role in shaping sexual cultures, politics, experiences, possibilities, and imaginations in the contemporary world. Sex tourism, catering primarily for heterosexual men, has long been established in both the ‘developed’ world (Amsterdam remains the prime example) as well as in poorer countries such as Thailand and the Philippines, while the transnational trafficking of women for sex work is also well documented (Perrenas 2006). The growth of gay and lesbian communities, a result of the gay liberation movements of the 1970s, has made them a more recent favourite target for the consumption market and culture. It is not only the sex industry that has become global (Mai 2013); queer tourism – from gay cruise ships to pride parades and carnivals in metropolitan cities – has also become a massive transnational industry. Puar (2002a,b), instead of seeing it as a new product of contemporary globalisation, warned us about the colonial connections already embedded in the direction, routes, and dynamics of queer tourist flows across countries. On the one hand, the global circuits of queer commodities (such as images, literary texts, films, festivals, and services) have helped the circulation of queer cultures and the transnational formation of queer identities and acceptance. Featuring a cover story titled ‘Let Them Wed’, The Economist enthusiastically commented on queer globalisation in its January 1996 issue: ‘In effect, what McDonald’s has done for food and Disney has done for entertainment, the global emergence of ordinary gayness is doing for sexual cultures’ (cited in Altman 1996, p. 1).

On the other hand, the circuits of global queering are not a level playing field, but rather spaces differentiated or, even, segmented by various forms of privilege (based on class, age, access to capital, geography, and co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Transnational sexualities: Migration, diasporic spaces, and sexual citizenship
• PART II Transnational sexual politics: Global markets, gender, and geopolitics
• PART III Transnational sexual activism: Global queer movements, local experiences, and resistances
• Index