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