One of my teachers in Delhi, Udaya Kumar, used to explain the concept of the Freudian unconscious with an image. He used to draw a horizontal white line on the blackboard which was an analogue for the ground. Then making a slight gash in the line, he talked of a burial…
Television today is inundated with reality programs, and formulaic sitcoms and dramas with very rare exception, and these shows are not only mechanical in their form and story development but in their depictions of social norms and cultural practices. This…
Review of: Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, edited and with an introduction by Thomas Glave, Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2008.
In September 2007, the liberal German daily newspaper Süddeutsche published an article entitled ‘Migrant kids against Gays’.[1] The article referred to the results of a study initiated by the German Lesbian and Gay Federation (LSVD), investigating attitudes among German students…
Judith Butler is in town. The foyer of the London School of Economics is packed with a young giddy crowd. We arrive half an hour before the talk, too late to secure a seat, and are herded into a televised…
Introduction
Current discussions of immigration in France are saturated with sensational narratives about gender and sexuality. The wearing of Islamic scarves, polygamy, forced marriages, female genital cutting, and the sexual victimization of young Muslim women, for instance, receive intense and…
In June 2005, the Canadian Parliament passed federal legislation that legally changed the definition of civil marriage to include same-sex couples. The successful passage of Bill C-38 followed various legal victories at provincial levels,[1] and was the culmination of a…
In June 2007, and in the name of Indigenous children, then Australian Prime Minister John Howard announced that he would be moving military troops into the Northern Territory to combat the allegedly high rates of child abuse in remote Indigenous…
Over the last 15 years more than a million people have immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union, welcomed by the Israeli ‘Law of Return’ that grants immediate citizenship and financial support to all Jews and their family members.…
On the 6th March 2006, South African Deputy President, Jacob Zuma pleaded not guilty to raping a 31 year old family friend, Khwezi, at his home on the 2nd of November 2005. During the highly publicised trial that followed, Zuma…
Zanele Muholi is a photographer and activist whose work explores issues of black women’s sexuality in post-apartheid South Africa. Muholi’s images raise issues such as hate crime, HIV/Aids, gender dissidence, performativity and passing. Muholi documents some of the key issues…
What is it about this particular historical moment that makes discourses of gay rights such an important resource for US/Western imperial projects? How do you account for the rapidity with which gay rights have been retrospectively mobilized as emblematic of Western freedoms?
A review of Povinelli, Elizabeth (2006) The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy and Carnality, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
