Third World Quarterly
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The queer Third World
Ilan Kapoor
To cite this article: Ilan Kapoor (2015) The queer Third World, Third World Quarterly, 36:9,
1611-1628, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1058148
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1058148
Published online: 25 Sep 2015.
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Third World Quarterly, 2015
Vol. 36, No. 9, 1611–1628, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1058148
The queer Third World
Ilan Kapoor*
Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada
This article attempts to align ‘queer’ and ‘Third World’ – grouping
them in their common inheritance of subjugation and disparagement
and their shared allegiance to non-alignment and a politics aimed at
disrupting domination and the status quo. In assembling both terms
one is struck by how, in the mainstream discourse of international
development, the Third World comes off looking remarkably queer:
under Western eyes it has often been constructed as perverse, abnormal and passive. Its sociocultural values and institutions are seen as
deviantly strange – backward, effete, even effeminate. Its economic
development is depicted as abnormal, always needing to emulate the
West, yet never living up to the mark (‘emerging’ perhaps, but never
quite arriving). For their part, postcolonial Third World nation-states
have tended to disown and purge such queering – by denying their
queerness; indeed often characterising it as a ‘Western import’ – yet
at the same time imitating the West and pursuing neoliberal capitalist
growth. I want not only to make the claim that the Western and Third
World stances are two sides of the same discourse but, drawing on
Lacanian queer theory, also to suggest that a ‘queer Third World’
would better transgress this discourse by embracing queerness as the
site of structural negativity and destabilising politics.
Keywords: queer; Third World; development; Orientalism; colonial
sexual politics; hetero-normativity; homophobia; Lacanian queer
theory; radical politics
Introduction
There is more than a certain affinity between ‘queer’ and ‘Third World’. Indeed,
the derogatory epithet ‘queer’ was reclaimed by gay and lesbian activists during
the 1980s–90s North American AIDS crisis to frame a new politics of gay
liberation. As a result, in contrast to mainstream lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) politics, which has most often centred on a liberal
politics of identity and rights, queer politics has come to signify a more radical
politics – an interrogation and disruption of social norms. For its part the term
‘Third World’, despite its current pejorative connotations of poverty, instability
and the ‘third rate’, possesses notably principled origins: it was coined by
*Email: ikapoor@yorku.ca
© 2015 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com
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I. Kapoor
French demographer Alfred Sauvy and became popular after the 1955 Bandung
Conference, at which the leaders of newly independent states (Nasser, Nehru, U
Nu, Sukarno) articulated a programme of political non-alignment. The intent
was to chart a new global arrangement (subsequently called the ‘New International Economic Order’) that steered clear of either capitalist or communist bloc
rivalries.
What ‘queer’ and ‘Third World’ thus have in common is a politics of nonconformity and dissidence. Both arise from a history of subjugation, attempting
to resist and destabilise domination and the power of the status quo. Both operate from the margins, questioning normalising power mechanisms and social
order, while upholding a deviant, non-conformist and non-assimilationist politics. And both are associated with equally negative and disparaging discursive
connotations – the one attempting to reclaim such meanings in favour of a radical politics, the other stemming from a (failed) progressive politics of development that now awaits recuperation. My aim in this article is to try and align
both concepts, that is, to group them in their common inheritance of subjugation
and disparagement and their shared allegiance precisely to non-alignment and a
radical politics (of development).
In assembling both terms, in fact, one is struck by how, in the mainstream
discourse of international development, the Third World comes off looking
remarkably queer: under Western eyes, it has often been constructed as perverse,
abnormal and passive. Its sociocultural values and institutions are seen as
deviantly strange – backward, effete, even effeminate. Its economic development
is depicted as abnormal, always needing to emulate the West, yet never living
up to the mark (‘emerging’ perhaps, but never quite arriving). For their part,
despite the inheritance of Bandung,1 postcolonial Third World nation-states have
tended to disown and purge such queering – by denying their queerness and, in
fact, often characterising it as a ‘Western import’ – yet at the same time imitating the West, modernising and Westernising sociocultural institutions, and pursuing neoliberal capitalist growth. I want not only to make the claim that the
Western and Third World stances are two sides of the same discourse but, drawing on Lacanian queer theory, also to suggest that a ‘queer Third World’ would
better transgress this discourse by embracing queerness as the site of structural
negativity and destabilising politics.
Before teasing out these arguments, a clarificatory note on my use of the
word ‘queer’. It is often employed as an umbrella term for LBGTI and, while I,
too, will use it in that sense to an extent, in this article I am more interested in
its political sense of deviant, perverse or resistant to normalising practices. In
many ways the latter meaning is incompatible with the former, since queerness
is precisely a questioning of fixed identity, no matter whether gay or straight.
Moreover, to the extent that queerness is about deviancy from social norms, it is
not restricted to issues of sexuality, but can apply equally to categories of race,
economy, nation or gender (hence my attempt at grouping it with ‘Third World’
as metaphor for ‘non-aligned’). Nonetheless, the notion of queerness has grown
out of the particular historical experience of marginalisation of queers as a sexual minority, which has shed light not just on questions of sexual perversity, but
on a range of normalising practices that my analysis will attempt to highlight.
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Queerness and the West
According to Foucault, homosexuality is a Western construct of the 19th
century, at which time it became a site of systematic legal, religious and medical
investigation.2 Before that period ‘sodomy’ and same-sex relations did of course
happen; but, though considered ‘sinful’ and always at risk of being suppressed
and harshly punished, such sexually ‘deviant’ practices also had a certain degree
of social acceptance, with even a few instances of flourishing in urban subcultures. It was only in the late 19th century that ‘sexual perversion’ began to be
scrutinised, classified and pathologised (as a disease), giving way to the modern
notion of homosexuality. ‘The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the
homosexual was now a species’, writes Foucault.3
But whether in pre-modern or modern times, queerness has a history of
marginalisation and oppression. Hetero-normativity – the social ordering that
privileges heterosexuality and accepts as normal and natural the complementarity between the sexes — has meant the simultaneous production of sexual
minorities as ‘queer’, abnormal, unnatural, defective. Lee Edelman calls this
‘reproductive futurism’: Western society sustains itself on the promise of a
harmonious future by upholding the image of the innocent child to buttress
social reproduction and the ‘absolute privilege of heteronormativity’.4 Generational succession is ensured, then, through a forward-looking reproductive
politics of hope. And, according to such a politics, to the extent that queers do
not procreate (at least not until the advent of in vitro fertilisation), they do not
reproduce the social. Indeed, they are often seen as threatening key social
institutions: their lack of family orientation compromises such things as community and civil society, while their ‘sterile’ and non-reproductive ‘lifestyle’
endangers capitalism, which so depends on labour and wealth accumulation.
No wonder, as a consequence, that queers in the West have been subjected
to torment through the ages. One thinks here of the castration of ‘effeminate’
young boys in the Middle Ages, the vilification and persecution of homosexuals
(as well as women, witches, Muslims, Jews and the poor) during the Crusades
and Inquisition, and the execution of ‘sodomites’ under the 16th-century English
Buggery Act.5 More recent, often right-wing and conservative attacks against
queers include the Nazi persecution of gay men (alongside Jews and Gypsies),
anti-homosexual discrimination during McCarthy’s anti-communist purge in the
USA, and the Anita Bryant ‘Save Our Children’ crusade against gay rights in
the late-1970s. All speak to attempts at preserving the social fabric, and hence
reforming or eliminating queers as an embodiment of the threat to reproductive
futurism.
Of late, a much more liberal approach to queerness has taken hold in the
West (and other parts of the world, too). Contemporary liberalism now treats
homosexuality as a sexual expression, lifestyle and identity, granting sexual
minorities legal rights and protections, including gay marriage. This mainstreaming of LGBTI identities is reflected in liberal political economy as well, with
queers targeted by mass-media and lifestyle marketing. ‘Out is In’, or so the slogan goes. Rather than being treated as a limit or threat to the social, the queer
non-reproductive lifestyle is now a marketing and consumer opportunity.
But, as several queer theorists have been quick to point out,6 such ‘queer
liberalism’ tends to leave hetero-normativity intact. It deals with sex as a
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I. Kapoor
personal or civil rights issue, thus avoiding broader structural change. In fact,
far from posing a threat to the social order, queer liberalism helps reinforce it: it
continues to uphold reproductive futurism by buttressing the institutions of marriage, family, domesticity and nation, while also strengthening and promoting
hetero-patriarchal global capitalism through niche marketing and consumerism.
Queering the Third World
It should come as no surprise that, before decolonisation, the discursive representations of queerness in the West found their way into European colonial
representations of the Third World. Indeed, as several postcolonial analysts have
argued,7 colonial domination was often justified and exercised through various
forms of homophobia (as well as sexism and racism). Queering the Third World
enabled the coloniser to distinguish himself from the colonised, buttressing his
masculinity and social respectability and, as a result, rationalising both his
‘civilising mission’ and denigration of local culture.
Thus, early colonial reports represented Amerindians in Colombia as sexual
deviants and degenerates, engaging in ‘bestiality, sodomy, incest, and other
unnatural practices’.8 Similarly 16th and 17th century European travel journals
referred to Africans as ‘hot-tempered’ and ‘lascivious’,9 with historian and
colonial administrator, Edward Long, describing African women as
‘libidinous...monkeys’.10 Black men and women were frequently reduced to their
bodies (or to animality), lacking cognitive abilities or self-control, and invariably
depicted as unintelligible, deceptive and dishonest.11 In this regard, Eve Sedgwick,
writing about the ‘closet’ in modern Western culture, claims that the hetero/homo
binary was often intertwined with the knowledge/ignorance binary, so that secrecy,
opacity and deceitfulness were associated with homosexuality.12 Such
associations, it seems, circulated well in the racialised colonial context, too.
It was not uncommon for the sexualisation of the Third World to resort to
various forms of misogyny (as evidenced by the Edward Long quote above).
Anne McClintock coins the term ‘porno-tropics’ to describe how colonised lands
were labelled ‘virgin territories’ to rationalise their take-over (or their
‘penetration’ or ‘rape’), while at the same time representing their inhabitants,
and especially native women, as sexually promiscuous and voracious.13 Native
men, for their part, if they were not being directly portrayed as ‘sodomites’,
were often symbolically castrated by being labelled ‘effeminate’.14 Mrinalini
Sinha shows, in this regard, how the stereotype of the effeminate Bengali helped
secure the British self-image of masculinity and justify the continued British
presence in India in the late 19th-century, for example by helping rebuff
(emasculate?) Indian demands for greater access to power.15
The theme of sexual perversity and the myth of the ‘erotic East’ are repeated in
a plethora of writings about the Orient by European adventurers, travellers,
geographers, anthropologists and administrators.16 Often it is Arab and Muslim
cultures that are depicted as sexually promiscuous, with much of the writing
presenting them as tolerating and even propagating such ‘aberrant’ practices as
sodomy.17 Of particular note is the work of late 19th-century adventurerexplorer Richard Burton, who hypothesised that there is a ‘Sotadic Zone’
stretching from Southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa to Asia-Pacific and
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the Southern ‘New World’, where sexual perversion is endemic thanks to the warm
climate. He claimed that this Sotadic Zone was rife with ‘debaucherie’ and ‘erotic
perversion’, and that pederasty (referred to as ‘Le Vice contre nature’) was
practised alongside bestiality, cannibalism, infanticide and prostitution.18
Of course, representations such as Burton’s amounted not simply to naive
orientalist exoticism; as suggested above, homophobia, misogyny and racism
served as important technologies to support and advance colonial power. In this
connection Anne Stoler talks about racialised sexual hierarchies established in
the Dutch Indies between colonialists and natives – how strict laws were constructed to distinguish all-white from mixed couples, and ‘pure breeds’ from the
progeny of mixed marriages or cohabitation.19 According to Richard Philips,
such sexual control was also present in the British Empire during the Victorian
period, with carefully thought-out rules regulating sexual relationships among
and between Britishers and locals. These covered everything from marriage,
cohabitation and consensual sex to prostitution, ‘buggery’ and sexual diseases,
all aimed at ensuring ‘moral’ and social order.20 In a similar vein Glen Elder
argues in the South African context that colonial domination reflected pervasive
anxieties about homosexual relations among and between Whites and Blacks.
Such anxieties were visible, for example, in the geographic ordering of apartheid, with clearly demarcated and strictly enforced spatial and discursive divisions (eg between Black miners’ dormitories and White family residential
estates, or between the ethnicised Bantustans or Black township ghettos and the
White inner city neighbourhoods).21
The sexualisation and queering of the Third World thus helped discursively
construct the Third World. This is what Edward Said famously called Orientalism. On the one hand, as Said points out, such a construction had ‘less to do
with the Orient than it [did] with “our” [Western] world’.22 To be sure, the
colonisers were acting out their own European homophobic (and other) prejudices and representations in the colonies. The Third World served, in this sense,
as a screen onto which Western colonial sexual fantasies, desires and anxieties
were being projected or transferred.23 But, on the other hand, these were not
neutral prejudices and representations; they had material and institutional consequences. Racist homophobia resulted in physical violence against the colonised,24 while colonial sexual control, as we saw above, yielded enforceable
laws, social hierarchies and geographic demarcations. The Third World was thus
produced as queer: not in the sense of the West imposing homosexuality on the
colonies (quite the opposite), but in the Saidian sense of Orientalism as the
‘enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient’.25 Regardless of whether the Third World
actually was ‘queer’, it was represented, regulated and disciplined as such.
Given these material and institutional impacts, it is little wonder that the
colonial queering of the Third World has had enduring legacies. This is evident
perhaps no more so than in the field of international development. For example,
the very notion of development stages ‘traditional’ societies as pathological, that
is, deviating from what is taken as the natural progression towards (Western)
capitalist modernity. What is remarkable about the ‘trad/mod’ binary that undergirds this discourse is how queer the Third World is made out to be – unnatural,
abnormal, effete, passive (read: effeminate), strange, backward, underdeveloped,
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I. Kapoor
threatening. This is particularly true in relation to economic performance, assessments of which tend to be nothing less than emasculating: growth is invariably
shown to be limping, if not falling short, the result of incompetence, corruption
and weak entrepreneurialism, which render the typical Third World economy
incapable of competing against aggressive, win-or-die global business. The solution to such feebleness and failure is usually structural adjustment and debt
relief, which many countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, have been
coerced into accepting. These frequently entail severe ‘austerity’ measures (fiscal
‘discipline’, budget slashing, privatisation, market liberalisation) and a heavy
dose of browbeating (the need for economic ‘correctness’ and sound policy,
‘good’ governance, and greater transparency and anti-corruption rules). Through
a queer lens this all looks like an exercise in economic straight-ening, aimed at
disciplining, punishing and exorcising the Third-World-as-queer.
The recent global security discourse continues in this vein. As Mark Duffield
contends, this discourse constructs the ‘borderlands’ (ie the Third World) as an
imagined geographic space of instability, excess and social breakdown, thus posing a threat to the West.26 The Third World is typically seen as violent and
unpredictable, or at least a potential danger; it is the source of many of the problems seen to plague global security, including drug trafficking, terrorism, rapid
population growth, refugee flows, weak, corrupt or rogue states and, more
recently, infectious disease.
To be sure, the global spread of infectious diseases has been used to aid and
abet, if not the queering of the Third World, certainly its continued sexualisation, while also buttressing the global security discourse. With regard to the
HIV/AIDS pandemic, Black African men and women, in particular, have tended
to be portrayed as dangerous and irresponsible in their sexual behaviour, with
the colonial stereotype of the sexually voracious African commonly reproduced
in Western donor and international health agency policy documents as the main
explanation for the spread of AIDS.27 Other infectious diseases (SARS, bird flu,
swine flu, Ebola), while not sexually transmitted, have nonetheless retained a
racialised sexual dimension in media, development and security discourses:28
they are seen as originating in ‘overpopulated’ places (eg China, Mexico, West
Africa), where people apparently reproduce too much and live in close proximity both to billions of animals (poultry, swine, bats and other wild animals) and
to one another, which propagates the exchange of bodily fluids and disease.
Reminiscent of colonial technologies of power, this pitting of ‘normal’ against
‘abnormal’ populations – healthy vs unhealthy, peopled vs overpopulated/teeming, sexually conventional vs licentious/queer, clean vs infected, lascivious,
beastly – helps construct and justify the policies that we have now come to
associate with global security: the profiling, detention, deportation, quarantining
or indeed elimination of threatening groups.
It is also important to note the West’s newfound championing of gay rights
globally, in the wake of queer liberalism. Colonial homophobia towards the
Third World is increasingly being replaced by a high-mindedness which now
sees the West judging Third World (and Eastern European) states as either
homo-friendly or homophobic, frequently hectoring them when they fail to protect LGBTI rights, to the point of withholding aid (as was the case recently with
the US aid programme in Uganda, for example). Yet, despite appearances, this
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latest Western stand is also a form of queering: the colonial manoeuvre may
well have hinged on homophobia, which the West now conveniently condemns;
but the current Western strategy nonetheless pivots on a manipulative ‘homorighteousness’, as it were. Both are equally orientalist technologies of power
aimed at estranging the Third World, belittling it, putting it in its place.
‘Unqueering’ the Third World
While there has been continuity from colonial to contemporary times in the
Western representation of the Third-World-as-queer, there have also been moves
in the opposite direction on the part of postcolonial Third World countries –
attempts at ‘unqueering’ themselves, at purging the queer from their midst. In
some measure this is a reaction to the humiliation and inferiority wrought by
(neo)colonialism and Orientalism: the desire to be equal to one’s (former) master, perhaps even to imitate him; and hence the desire not to be different or
queer. Maureen Sioh takes a psychoanalytic view of this phenomenon, showing
how the anxieties of humiliation and the desire for dignity are played out in
East Asian economies. For her these countries’ striving for economic growth is
equally a straining to command the same degree of respect globally as does the
West.29
But to a great measure such unqueering is specifically geared towards
purging the homosexual. A sure sign of this is the continued criminalisation of
homosexuality in much of the Third World (most of the Middle East, North
Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and parts of Latin America and East
Asia). Several countries (eg Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, parts of
Nigeria and Sudan) even make same-sex relationships punishable by death. Of
late it has been sub-Saharan Africa that has seen particularly virulent forms of
homophobia, in the wake of Uganda’s ‘Kill the Gays’ bill, Nigeria’s ‘Jail the
Gays’ law, Gambia’s ‘Aggravated Homosexuality’ legislation and Robert
Mugabe’s repeated statements about homosexuals as offending ‘the law of nature and the morals and religious beliefs espoused by our society’.30 Several
African leaders, including Mugabe, have characterised homosexuality as
‘un-African’, denouncing it as a dangerous and perverted Western import.31 And
this in spite of numerous findings of same-sex practices across Africa before
colonial rule.32
These legal prohibitions and homophobic outbursts appear to have several
causes. First, we should recall that many of the sodomy laws criminalising
homosexuality are carry-overs from British, Portuguese and French colonial
rule.33 Most often these laws have made sexual practices that were previously
socially acceptable into abnormal ones, thus creating an enabling environment
for intolerance against queers. Second, homophobia is often used by Third
World leaders for political purposes, for example to whip up public sentiment as
a diversion from important socioeconomic problems. Mugabe leaps to mind
here, given that his repeated homophobic (and anti-West) rants have run alongside his country’s ongoing political and social instabilities. Finally, right-wing
US evangelical and pentecostal proselytising, particularly in postcolonial subSaharan Africa, has played an important part in promoting assaults against
homosexuality (and abortion). The prominent role of US religious groups in
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I. Kapoor
fanning homophobia in Uganda in recent years is now well acknowledged, but
there is also growing evidence of these groups lobbying for conservative policies and laws in such countries as Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Kenya.34
Over the years this has all undoubtedly contributed to homophobic violence
and prejudice. LGBTI people have been the victims of beatings, detention, torture, murder and death across the Third World. They have been denied access to
health care or other social services and benefits.35 And they have often suffered
in silence for fear of being ‘outed’ or reported to the authorities. In relation to
present-day Uganda, for example, Sylvia Tamale underscores how the state’s
‘regime of compulsory heterosexuality’ creates a climate of fear among LGBTI
people and among women, and severely limits public discourse on such key
issues as marriage, sex and gender.36
Of course, this process of unqueering does not apply uniformly across the
Third World. There are several exceptions worth noting of countries that have
embraced a queer liberalism: there are constitutional protections for LGBTI people in South Africa, Fiji and Ecuador, and same-sex marriage/union recognition
in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador and some states in Mexico. Yet, while
there is no doubt that these places are relatively more progressive on queer
issues, there remain nonetheless, in these as in other parts of the Third World,
some deep-seated homophobic prejudices and practices (as is the case in many
parts of the West as well). A large part of the reason has to do with continuing
forms of hetero-normativity embedded in development processes.
Indeed, for the most part development assumes heterosexuality. Heterosexual
marriage is taken as the basis of the family unit and the building block of social
reproduction. Yet this has often meant the de facto legitimation of patriarchal
and capitalist relations of power: as head of the household, the husband and
father wields authority not only over all family members (especially women) but
also over the labour of each member. A gendered division of labour ensues:
men typically work outside the home for a wage, while women engage in
unpaid household labour (food preparation, child rearing, cleaning); if the latter
do work outside, they are remunerated less than men. Most often women carry
a double load (homework and professional work); to that extent they are ensuring the health, well-being and labour supply of both family and workforce.37
So when development programming assumes heterosexuality or takes the
‘household’ for granted, as it customarily does, it is validating and reinforcing
these hetero-patriarchal capitalist relationships. As Susie Jolly points out, land
reform programmes, anti-poverty strategies and rural planning alike, because
they treat the nuclear family and male head-of-household as the norm, end up
not only favouring men over women but also result in ‘more pressure on people
to...stay within heterosexual family set-ups’.38
The consequences for queer people are numerous and generally dire. The
social (ie hetero-patriarchal and capitalist) pressures to marry, along with the
socioeconomic benefits of marriage (dowries, inheritance, the prospect of
increased social status and standard of living) mean that gay and lesbian people
are inclined to get and stay married. Such compulsory heterosexuality discourages women, in particular, from leaving unhappy, abusive or violent marriages.
Lesbians (wives, mothers, daughters) frequently suffer in silence, with suicide
rates among their ranks, and the ranks of LGBTI people more generally, tending
Third World Quarterly
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to be high.39 Should queers dare to ‘come out’, they usually suffer severe social
injunctions, including family- or community-sanctioned rape.40 The loss of
family, in turn, means the loss of social capital (eg family, kinship and/or caste
networks), which threatens their very livelihoods and survival. The result is
socioeconomic marginalisation, with many LGBTI people being forced into
either the informal sector or prostitution and the global sex trade.41
Of late, usually at the behest of international or Western aid agencies, there
have been a few attempts to target state programmes towards ‘disadvantaged’
groups. But these, too, have not escaped hetero-normative biases.42 Gender programming, for example, has generally taken straight women as the norm, thus
invisibilising queer or non-traditional heterosexual women.43 The same appears
to be true, at least to a degree, of HIV/AIDS programming, which has tended to
assume the disease is transmitted only heterosexually, thus neglecting gay
men.44 Interventions specifically directed towards LGBTI communities are few
and far between and most often not benign. In his assessment of programming
for ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM), for example, Andil Gosine concludes
that the representations of gay men in such programming tend to mirror those of
the colonial era: the queer is seen as ‘uncivilized, unwieldy, threatening and
requiring management to save him from himself, as well as the world...In other
words, health care interventions directed at MSM are justified toward protection
and preservation of the heterosexual nation.’45
The unqueering of the Third World manifests itself, therefore, through homophobic laws, policies and prejudices that repress and closet homosexuals; and
through hetero-normative structures that normalise sexual behaviour and perpetuate gender and capitalist hierarchies. As for development programming, to
the large extent that it incorporates and reflects these underlying structures and
prejudices, it can often contribute to the marginalisation of queers, sometimes
even when it intends to help them.
The queer Third World
How, then, to interpret the paradoxical attempts by the West to queer the Third
World and by the Third World to ‘unqueer’ itself? While seemingly contradictory, I want to suggest that both moves are two sides of the same coin. That is,
both result from the same orientalist hetero-normative discourse founded on the
normal/abnormal or the straight/queer binary. As the historically dominant power
the West is here casting itself in a positive light by othering the Third World; as
the historically subordinate power the Third World is compensating for its
othering and humiliation by shedding and purging its abnormality/queerness.
The Third World is thus buying into and reproducing (symbolically and materially) its oppressor’s binary structure of signification. It may well characterise
homosexuality as a Western ‘import’, yet such characterisation is nothing but a
continuation of the very colonial technologies of power (homophobia, racism,
sexism) that it has purportedly fought against. It may well posture as anti-West,
yet such posturing is belied, for the most part, by its de facto imitation of the
West – its embrace of Westernisation and neoliberal growth strategies, for
example.
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I. Kapoor
It is the fact that both the West and the Third World are shot through with
the same forces of global capitalism, moreover, that helps explain why each is
locked into, and reproduces, the same hetero-normative discourse. Both are
equally beholden to a socioeconomic system that thrives, as we have seen, on a
gendered division of labour and the marginalisation of queers. Thus, even the
recent advent of queer liberalism in (most of) the West and (parts of) Third
World can only ensure the tolerant incorporation of LGBTI rights into liberal
capitalism, leaving mostly untouched the deeper hierarchic and hetero-patriarchal
structures.
The irony is that, strive as it may to be equal to the West, the Third World
will never be equal to the task. This is because the orientalist hetero-normative
discourse it consents to already sets it up as a failure, ensuring that it can never
be fully ‘developed’ – an ‘emerging economy’ perhaps, but never one that has
surfaced.
So how might one avert reproducing this orientalist hetero-normative
discourse? Is queer/Third World liberation possible without acquiescing to
(neo)colonial and homophobic technologies of power? I would like to draw on
the work of queer theorist Lee Edelman to offer some tentative answers.46
Rather than countering the homophobic stereotypes and practices that result
from hetero-normative discourses, Edelman argues for embracing, not the stereotypes and practices themselves, but the social antagonisms to which they point
(eg the impossibility of the ‘normal’). He thus advocates a relentless politics of
negativity as a way of short-circuiting hetero-normativity.
Edelman is drawing on Jacques Lacan here. For Lacan reality is precarious,
always fractured by gaps and contradictions, which he refers to as the ‘Real’.47
This Lacanian Real is the limit – the horizon of negativity – of any signifying/
discursive system; it punctures meaning and identity, making them forever lacking and unstable. And it is this emphasis on the instability of identity that aligns
Lacanian psychoanalysis with queer theory, prompting Tim Dean to state:
‘Lacan makes psychoanalysis look rather queer’.48 Both Lacan and queer theory
(of the type espoused by Edelman) share the radical questioning of social
norms. They dispute the very idea of the ‘normal’, upon which heterosexuality
is founded. For example, according to Lacan, there is nothing natural or normal
about sex (hence his famous one-liner, ‘There is no sexual relation’49). This is
because people connect not through some primordial attraction but through language, which for Lacan is always incomplete, imprecise, opaque. Thus, far from
being tied to biology or the identity or sexual orientation of the other, desire is
tied to language (in fact, desire is, for Lacan, an effect of language; that is, the
result of the gaps/Real in language50). And, by affirming a stable identity and
notions of the natural and the normal, hetero-normativity conceals or disavows
such instability.
Like Lacan, Edelman sees negativity as constitutive of the social.51 He
approaches queerness as an embodiment of such negativity, yielding to a relentless disruption of social norms: queerness ‘can never define an identity; it can
only ever disturb one’, he declares.52 As highlighted earlier, his book, No
Future, is a critique of ‘reproductive futurism’; it exposes hetero-normativity’s
nostalgic treatment of childhood innocence and promise for what it is – a
strategy to buttress the future, that is, to maintain and further biological, social
Third World Quarterly
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and capitalist reproduction. To the extent that queerness is non-reproductive,
then, it represents the failure of hetero-normativity. Indeed, it threatens and fractures the social and in that sense – to echo Lacan – tends towards a politics of
the Real.53
Edelman coins the term ‘sinthomosexual’ to describe the main protagonist of
such a politics, a figure who, while created by reproductive futurism,
transgresses and dislocates it.54 What drives the sinthomosexual, according to
Edelman, is jouissance – a Lacanian concept meaning intense and transgressive
pleasure. His idea here is to put queer non-reproductive eros, so often disparaged by straight society as sterile and excessive,55 to use for political purposes
– to make the excessive transgressive, as it were.56 The sinthomosexual thus relishes the thrill derived from a politics of the Real: challenging authority, defying
patriarchy or undoing homophobia and hetero-normativity is (or can be) joyful,
if not ecstatic.57 Consequently it is this paradoxical pleasure – a jouissance that
delights in the pain or danger of the radical political act – that motivates,
nourishes and sustains a queer politics of the Real.
What are the implications of all of this for the Third World, given the challenge of trying to negotiate orientalist hetero-normative discourse without reproducing its binary structure? Clearly the idea is not to imitate the West since, as
we have seen, that merely normalises both the West’s domination and the Third
World’s subordination. Nor should one simply oppose the hegemon by criticising homophobia and orientalism or valorising a non-Western nativist or nationalist authenticity (eg ‘homosexuality is “un-African”’), since these, too, are an
acceptance of, and entrapment within, the given binary logic. At most, and as
we have seen, the latter yields to a tolerance of queers (ie a queer liberalism) or
a virulent and homophobic parochialism without addressing underlying questions of hetero-normativity or neo-colonialism. The idea, rather, is for the Third
World to embrace its queerness-as-negativity. Indeed, to the extent that it represents (or has been made to represent) the failure of global modernity, the Third
World threatens and fractures globalisation. Thus, by firmly inhabiting this position of structural negativity, it can help destabilise normalising practices, be they
neo-colonial, orientalist, hetero-normative, patriarchal or racist. By revisiting its
political roots in non-alignment, it can attempt to trouble the increasing naturalisation of global neoliberal capitalism. And by engaging in a relentless queer
politics of the Real, it can seek to mess up fixed binaries, identities or
hierarchies, whether political, gendered or sexual.
This would mean, for example, cultivating queer affect as a political strategy:
rather than directly criticising homophobic, misogynist or orientalist stereotypes,
showing a certain fatigue, indifference or boredom towards them; rather than
taking the hegemon seriously, responding with incredulity, disorderliness or
awkwardness; and rather than conforming to the master’s rules, wilfully forgetting or ignoring them, improvising with them, or over-identifying with them (ie
taking them seriously to the point of absurdity). Using stereotypical queer affect
in this way – whim, insincerity, camp, nonsense, over-the-top emotion, unregenerate sexuality, silliness, goofiness58 – interrupts and stupefies hegemonic
power by declining to address it directly, thereby delegitimising it. In this regard
Judith/Jack Halberstam suggests the deployment of more explicitly negative
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I. Kapoor
queer political emotions – from rage, anger, mania and spite to incivility, dyke
anger, anticolonial despair and punk pugilism. He59 states:
we must be willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange to
embrace a truly political negativity, one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a
mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash
back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock, and annihilate, and to
abandon the neat, clever, [and] chiasmatic.60
Queer affect can thus help produce an uncivil politics that no state or sociopolitical regime can easily discipline or regulate.
The effectiveness of any queer Third World politics will hinge crucially on
its ability to disrupt (hetero-normative) capitalism. This will involve rethinking
and reworking institutions as much as cultures: reordering labour relations and
the sexual/gender division of labour; moving away from legal regimes that privilege private and civil/political rights towards ones that also favour collective and
socioeconomic rights (eg land rights, housing rights, indigenous rights, gender
and queer rights); undoing capitalist discourses centred on wealth accumulation,
entrepreneurialism, market competition and patriarchal/masculinist codes; and so
on. But it will also involve creating spaces for non-conforming and non-capitalist practices. In this regard, echoing queer theorist Eve Sedgwick, J. K. GibsonGraham ask: ‘What if we were to depict social existence at loose ends with
itself...What if we were to “queer” capitalist hegemony and break apart some of
its consolidating associations?’61 They have in mind ‘post-capitalist’ social
economies such as cooperatives (eg the Mondragon Basque Cooperative), local
economic trading systems and remittance-based community projects (eg in the
Philippines),62 but we could add worker self-management enterprises, social
housing, participatory budgeting and community forestry. In the Third World
context the recuperation and reinvention of highly diverse subjugated, buried or
subaltern socioeconomic institutions, ranging from handicraft ateliers and small
animal husbandry to contemporary indigenous medicinal and health clinics and
small-scale textile workshops, will also be pertinent and important.
Given its non-conformist bent, a queer Third World politics of the type I am
gesturing towards would appear to cater more to non-state than state actors (the
state being a normalising set of institutions par excellence). Yet, given the state’s
continuing (albeit changing) significance in both domestic and global politics,
queering the state – pressuring it to institute non-capitalist practices such as
those described above, for example – will be vital. In this regard Bolivia’s current Morales regime appears to be one of the queerest globally: it has purposefully remained non-aligned to either the (Western) neoliberal democratic model
(adopted by most of the contemporary world) or the authoritarian capitalist
model (adopted by the likes of China, Russia, Singapore, etc). Instead, pursuing
a unique communitarian Andean model of ‘living well’, it is one of the very
few that has put the country’s subalterns first (indigenous groups and the
socioeconomically most poor and marginalised), while confronting domestic and
international economic elites and defying the free market proposals of the IMF
and World Bank. While certainly not perfect,63 it better illustrates how to
socioeconomically restructure (including how to effectively regulate powerful
Third World Quarterly
1623
mining multinationals) than do the vast majority of Third World states committed to non-alignment and the New International Economic Order.64
Finally, we must ask what a queer Third World politics means for Third
World queers. Although it is, of course, a politics that defies normalising and
hetero-normative practices and hence defends sexual minority and gender rights
writ large, its structural negativity also implies that LGBTI activism settle, not
on identity issues (eg queer liberalism), but on the intersection of queer politics
with other key socioeconomic problems. This is illustrated by the difference
between, say, a gay rights activist and a queer socialist revolutionary, or a progay marriage LGBTI association and LGBTI people fighting for subaltern land
rights. So, when Third World HIV/AIDS politics concerns itself not just with
discovering new and more effective retroviral drugs – thereby narrowly focusing
on science and funding issues – but with ensuring cheaper and equal access to
those drugs for all – thereby bringing the state and multinational pharmaceuticals to account – we have a queer Third World politics truer to its name. Eng
et al point, in a similar vein, to the emergence of global queer diasporas that are
increasingly denaturalising such institutions as home, nation, marriage and citizenship on the basis, not of origin, ethnicity or ‘race’, but of destination, sexuality and sociopolitical commitment.65 It is such nonconforming, intersectional
and politically messy engagements that yield a queer Third World politics of the
Real.
Conclusion
I have argued that the Third World’s attempts at ‘unqueering’ itself are a kneejerk response to the West’s attempts at queering it, thus reproducing the West’s
binary structure of signification. Instead of allowing it to be non-aligned, such
unqueering causes the Third World, on the contrary, to continue to perpetuate
orientalism and capitalist hetero-normativity, thereby confirming the West as the
‘best’ and the Third Word as too queer to ever quite reach the mark. As a
consequence, rather than suppress or disavow its queerness, I have suggested
the Third World embrace it. By occupying its (de facto constructed) position of
queerness-as-structural negativity, the Third World can dismantle normalising
practices – including orientalism, homophobia and capitalist hetero-normativity
– while at the same time searching for counter-hegemonic and non-capitalist
alternatives.
But of course none of this is easily done. Many difficult obstacles lie in the
way, with no guarantees of reaching one’s goals. A radical and deviant politics
always risks resistance, compromise and co-optation as a result of, say, elite
opposition, state repression or neoliberal commodification (think of how Che,
Gandhi and feminism have been commoditised of late). And, against these odds,
even were a queer counter-hegemony to be achieved, there is always the risk of
it becoming a new normativity. Contemporary LGBTI politics are a case in
point: not only is there nothing intrinsic to LGBTI groups that predisposes them
to a radical politics but, as mentioned above, Third World queer liberalism has
done little to move beyond civil rights and same-sex marriage recognition, the
latter tending to reinforce rather than dismantle hetero-normativity. Moreover,
where Third World LGBTI rights have been won, global capital has not
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I. Kapoor
hesitated to use this cultural–political shift as an opportunity for niche marketing
and consumerism, thus seducing LGBTI communities and blunting their political
resistance.
But then one must ask: what are the conditions of possibility of a queer
Third World politics? Is it not pie-in-the sky to suggest that such a radical
alternative can be practised when so much stands in its way? I want to return to
the question of jouissance, highlighted earlier, to provide (the beginnings of) an
answer: the great challenge for the Third World Left will be not merely to come
up with a queer alternative but to ensure it is a seductive one – one that people
will enjoy. It is not enough to draw people in at the level of the intellect; they/
we must also be seduced at the level of the passions. And a Left queer alternative will need to be at least as enjoyable as that put forward by hetero-normative
neoliberal capitalism – as pleasurable as the power that male patriarchs derive
from patriarchy, entrepreneurs from profit making or consumers from shopping.
It is jouissance, then, that can create the conditions of possibility of a dissident
queer alternative, one from which citizens and queer revolutionaries alike are
moved and enlivened – why not? – by the pain and peril of radical political acts
or the transgressive pleasures of working towards more just, but always
contested, societies.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments. I am very grateful to Mary Hawkesworth
and Andil Gosine for their feedback. And my infinite thanks to Kent, as always.
Notes on contributor
Ilan Kapoor is Professor of critical development studies at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto. He is the author of Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity (2013) and The Postcolonial Politics of
Development (2008). He is currently writing a book on psychoanalysis and
development, and recently edited a subtheme issue of Third World Quarterly on
this topic. His teaching and research focus on postcolonial theory and politics, participatory development and democracy, and psychoanalytic Marxism.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
‘Third World’ denotes for me, then, both the promise of non-alignment (as articulated in Bandung) and
its betrayal, as evidenced by the alignment of most postcolonial Third World states with Westernised
neoliberal capitalism.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality.
Ibid., 43.
Edelman, No Future, 2.
Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization. In contrast, see Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, who
argues that women and queers played a positive role in the shaping of modern Iranian politics and
culture.
Warner, The Trouble with Normal; Hennessy, “Queer Theory, Left Politics”; Edelman, No Future; and
Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure.
See, for example, McClintock, Imperial Leather; Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; and Philips,
Sex, Politics and Empire.
Jara and Spadaccini, quoted in Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean, 30.
Jordan, “First Impressions,” 44.
Edward Long, quoted in Young, Colonial Desire, 151. See also Gosine, “Monster, Womb, MSM.”
Third World Quarterly
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
1625
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 221; Gosine, “‘Race’, Culture,” 32; and Gosine, “Monster, Womb,
MSM,” 27.
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 4–5, 73.
McClintock, Imperial Leather, 21ff.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 82, points out the often contradictory nature of colonial stereotyping. For example, the colonised are characterised as both ‘effeminate’ sodomites and hyper-masculine
rapists threatening white women. Taken separately, each construction is used to justify colonial authority
as and where needed to estrange the Third World Other. Yet, grouped together, according to Bhabha,
they underline the ambivalent and unstable bases upon which such authority rests. The same could be
said today of international development: the Third World is stereotyped as weak and effeminate when it
comes to economic management but as hyper-sexed and macho when it comes to questions of ‘overpopulation’. Despite the contradiction, each construction queers the Third World, helping to justify First
World superiority and power.
Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.
Kabbani, Imperial Fictions, 26, 66.
Ibid., 65. See also Zavala, “Representing the Colonial Subject,” 330.
Burton, “Terminal Essay,” 206–207, 209, 222, 240. See also Kabbani, Imperial Fictions, 66.
Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire.
Philips, Sex, Politics and Empire, 5.
Elder, “Of Moffies”; and Elder, “The South African Body Politic.”
Said, Orientalism, 12.
See Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development, 64–66; and Nyongo’o, “Queer Africa,” 53.
See Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa?, 58.
Said, Orientalism, 3.
Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, ix, 24. See also Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, on the
deployment of ‘homo-nationalism’ to distinguish Western liberal democracies from racialised and
sexualised terrorists.
Gosine, “‘Race’, Culture,” 32; and Wilson, Race, Racism and Development, 97ff.
See, for example, Lavin and Russill, “The Ideology of the Epidemic.”
Sioh, “Manicheism Delirium.”
“Furious Mugabe.”
See Rukweza, “Is Homosexuality really ‘UnAfrican’?”
Same-sex practices have been shown to have occurred across Africa before colonial rule, for example
among the Nuba in Sudan, where men dressed and lived as women; among the Azande in Northern
Congo, where warriors habitually married boys, who functioned as temporary wives; in the pastoral
communities of Madagascar and Ethiopia, where transvestism was (and is) not uncommon; and among
the Khoikhoi in South Africa, where lesbianism was practiced in polygamous households. See Nadel,
The Nuba; Evans-Pritchard, “Sexual Inversion”; Murray and Roscoe, Boy-wives; and Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa?
See Stychin and Herman, Sexuality in the Legal Arena; and Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing.
See, for example, Kaoma, How the US Christian Right; and Williams, God Loves Uganda.
See Weiss and Bosia, Global Homophobia.
Tamale, Homosexuality Perspectives, 176.
Hennessy, “Queer Theory,” 102.
Jolly, “Why is Development Work so Straight?,” 24; and Jolly, “‘Queering’ Development,” 86.
See Weiss and Bosia, Global Homophobia. Note that in the Middle East low levels of participation by
women in the labour force have meant lesbian invisibility. See Lind and Share, “Queering Development”; Khayatt, “The Place of Desire”; and Drucker, “Changing Families,” 827.
Jolly, “‘Queering’ Development,” 80–81.
Drucker “Changing Families,” 827; Jolly, “Why is Development Work so Straight?,” 21–22; and Altman,
“The Emergence.”
In the context of international and Western donor agencies, Robert Mizzi coins the term ‘heteroprofessionalism’ to describe homophobic and heterosexist behaviours in the workplace that screen out homosexuality and privilege heterosexuality. See Mizzi, “‘There aren’t any Gays Here’.”
Jolly, “Why is Development Work so Straight?,” 26.
See Gosine, “Monster, Womb, MSM.”
Ibid., 30. There is also the risk of ‘homo-normativity’ in development programming geared towards
LGBTI people, especially by Western donors. That is, taking the white, Western gay man as the standard: assuming, for instance, that gay rights protection is a key objective when, in the development context, better access to health services or retroviral drugs might be much more significant. See Lind,
Development, Sexual Rights.
Edelman, No Future. Note that I have dealt with questions of the applicability of psychoanalysis to the
Third World elsewhere (including feminist and postcolonial criticisms of psychoanalysis, and the universalisability of the Lacanian viewpoint). See Kapoor, “Psychoanalysis and Development,” 1135–1138.
Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XI, 53.
1626
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
I. Kapoor
Dean, “Lacan and Queer Theory,” 238.
Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XVII, 134.
See Kapoor, “Psychoanalysis and Development,” 1122.
Along with Leo Bersani and Judith Halberstam, Edelman is often considered a proponent of the
‘anti-social’ thesis in queer theory, that is, an exponent of queer political negativity, unbelonging and
social alienation. See Bersani, Homos; and Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure.
Edelman, No Future, 17.
Ibid., 5, 9.
Ibid., 38, 47. Edelman is here drawing on the Lacanian concept of the sinthome, which is the particular
and unique form that jouissance (intense and transgressive pleasure) can take in every subject.
The issue of ‘sterility’ applies contradictorily in the Third World context. Just as Edelman argues is the
case in the West, LGBTI people in the Third World will tend to be characterised as ‘sterile’ because they
threaten reproductive capitalism. But in Western orientalist discourse the Third-World-as-queer will often
be depicted as the far opposite of sterile – as not just reproductive, but hyper-reproductive and ‘overpopulated’, to the point of threatening global sustainability. As underlined in note 14 above, while contradictory, each construction is a way of exercising and justifying domination of an Other (whether
LGBTI people or the Third-World-as-queer) by estranging it.
Edelman is, in fact, very hostile to politics, at least of the mainstream kind – one that is always looking
towards a future good (‘reproductive futurism’). Instead, he identifies with a queer politics of the Real/
the death drive, oriented towards transgression and rupture.
Edelman, No Future, 85.
See Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 109–110. See also Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, which
shows how sexual trauma and queer affect can catalyse political activism and communities.
Judith Halberstam tends to employ the masculine pronoun to refer to himself and sometimes goes by the
name ‘Jack’.
Halberstam, “The Politics of Negativity,” 824. See also Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 110. Here,
Halberstam is being critical of Edelman. He criticises No Future for relying on examples mainly from
‘white gay male culture’ (Edelman illustrates sinthomosexuality by drawing on Charles Dickens’
Ebenezer Scrooge, George Eliot’s Silas Marner, Leonard in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, and the
birds in Hitchcock’s The Birds). While I agree to some extent with this criticism, and draw on Halberstam (and Edelman) on the use of queer affect for political purposes, I tend not to endorse Halberstam’s
main argument in The Queer Art of Failure. Indeed, in championing failure as a queer ‘art’, Halberstam
ends up essentialising queerness-as-failure: rather than averting and dismantling the success/failure binary
promoted by capitalist hetero-normativity, Halberstam reproduces it by seeing failure as success (and
characterising failure as some kind of authentic queer political art). It seems to me that, by living up to
‘failure’, the queer (or in our case the Third World) is buying into the capitalist logic of success rather
than disrupting it. The challenge, to follow Edelman, is not to oppose the discourse of success by
valorising its opposite (ie failure as essence), but to see failure as structural negativity (ie as the Real,
which disrupts every attempt at success, including failure-as-success).
Gibson-Graham, “Queer(y)ing Capitalism,” 81, 93. See also Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism,
138; and Oswin, “The End of Queer.”
Gibson-Graham, “Queer(y)ing Capitalism”; and Gibson-Graham, A Post-capitalist Politics.
A weak judiciary (jeopardising the country’s democratic system), budding state authoritarian tendencies
and a growing cult of personality centred on Morales are some of the main criticisms directed against
the current Bolivian state. Of course, institutionalised hetero-normativity (and homophobia) continues to
remain a major challenge with this state, as with all states. See Fontana, “On the Perils.”
The Bolivian example also suggests that queer states are more likely to emerge in the Third World than
the West, given the latter’s mostly uncritical championing of neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracy
over the past three decades, and at least pockets of resistance to these throughout the Third World during
the same period (eg Chavez’s Venezuela, Castro’s Cuba, Allende’s Chile, Kerala’s democratic communism, etc).
Eng et al., “Introduction,” 7–10.
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