Obendorf, Simon (2006) Sodomy as metaphor. In: Postcolonizing the international: working to change the way we are. Writing past colonialism . University of Hawai'i Press, Hawai'i, pp. 177-206. ISBN 9780824830069

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Abstract

Whether it is at the grass roots or at elite levels, discourses of homosexuality have become a prominent feature of global dialogue and debate in the contemporary world. The editors of a recent collection entitled Queer Globalizations express it thus: “as the private is ever more commodi¤ed and the body is more and more targeted as a site of global consumption, queer sexualities and cultures have come to occupy center stage in some of the most urgently disputed issues of our times.”1 Recent scholarship has also pointed to the signi¤cance of sexuality studies for the study of the international, arguing that, “[i]f sex can learn from globalization and transnationalism, these schools have much to gain from critical studies of sex.”2 Yet, it remains the case that for most scholarly approaches to the international, a systematic engagement with issues of sexuality appears as a new and radical starting point, unsettling of disciplinary orthodoxies and to be quickly brought within the fold of established methodologies and approaches.3 And while sexuality studies have begun to seriously consider international ¶ows,4 they have not yet engaged comprehensively with the way in which sexuality has been deployed as a tool through which persons, institutions, and nations have negotiated their often complex relations with the international. What remains absent is an analysis of how sexuality acts to inform those meanings which help constitute the nature of what is regarded as the international— of the ways in which sexuality provides both a vocabulary and a locus of meaning to which individuals turn in order to explain and make sense of current-day international issues and events. It is this phenomenon that

Item Type:	Book Section
Additional Information:	Whether it is at the grass roots or at elite levels, discourses of homosexuality have become a prominent feature of global dialogue and debate in the contemporary world. The editors of a recent collection entitled Queer Globalizations express it thus: “as the private is ever more commodi¤ed and the body is more and more targeted as a site of global consumption, queer sexualities and cultures have come to occupy center stage in some of the most urgently disputed issues of our times.”1 Recent scholarship has also pointed to the signi¤cance of sexuality studies for the study of the international, arguing that, “[i]f sex can learn from globalization and transnationalism, these schools have much to gain from critical studies of sex.”2 Yet, it remains the case that for most scholarly approaches to the international, a systematic engagement with issues of sexuality appears as a new and radical starting point, unsettling of disciplinary orthodoxies and to be quickly brought within the fold of established methodologies and approaches.3 And while sexuality studies have begun to seriously consider international ¶ows,4 they have not yet engaged comprehensively with the way in which sexuality has been deployed as a tool through which persons, institutions, and nations have negotiated their often complex relations with the international. What remains absent is an analysis of how sexuality acts to inform those meanings which help constitute the nature of what is regarded as the international— of the ways in which sexuality provides both a vocabulary and a locus of meaning to which individuals turn in order to explain and make sense of current-day international issues and events. It is this phenomenon that
Keywords:	Postcolonialism
Subjects:	L Social studies > L380 Political Sociology
Divisions:	College of Social Sciences > Faculty of Health & Social Sciences > School of Social & Political Sciences
Depositing User:	Jill Partridge
Date Deposited:	01 Oct 2007
Last Modified:	13 Mar 2013 08:26
URI:	http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/id/eprint/1254

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