Queer Mapping as Decolonial Praxis

Abstract

Above the desk in my home hangs Rebecca Solnit's “City of Women” map, adapted from the New York City subway maps but with the stops renamed after iconic women from the US; it reclaims the space and uncovers herstories that the cityscape ordinarily hides. Maps are so commonplace within our environments that we rarely consider their form, content, structure, location, and use, except perhaps the collector searching the archives for a special edition. We map spaces while planning our daily commute or special outings. We map moments, like significant dates, times, locations, and the people with whom we experienced them (or would want to). We map the future by creating five- or ten-year plans. We map ourselves, our bodies, and our thoughts in our reflections and relationships and remake our inner and outer worlds based on these many maps. As we search for ourselves and others for meaning, purpose, and belonging, we engage with what Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan calls “subjective mapping,” giving meaning to space based on our unique lived experiences of our social identities as racialized, classed, and gendered beings. The subjects’ experiences of space, place, time, and belonging inform the maps they create, whether physical or imaginative.Ghisyawan's book Erotic Cartographies: Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination offers over twenty maps in different sizes, scales, and colors, inclusive of various emblems, revealing how “safety,” “space,” and “sexuality” are understood, negotiated, and embodied from the perspectives of same-sex-loving women in Trinidad and Tobago (of African, South Asian, and Chinese descent), the first ethnography to do so. Within Trinidad's heteronormative state, the maps show how same-sex-loving women carve out spaces of safety within the family, home, community, and religious institutions, asserting themselves as queer women. The women's maps illustrate their “unique perceptions of spatial and social experiences that occurred over spans of time and that are thought to have affected their sexuality and ability to safely enact, or embody, their sexuality” (33).Ghisyawan asserts that Erotic Cartographies “is a project in (re)mapping Caribbean space from same-sex loving women's perspectives, through an exploration of both their safe and their unsafe spaces” (14). Maps were instrumental in colonial knowledge production and domination. Indeed, much of what we know of Caribbean histories, such as sexual practices and gender, racial, and class structures, were formed through colonialism, and the stories of Caribbean peoples have been told from the perspective of European colonizers. Diverse embodied and in-spirited ways of knowing, existing, and being in the world have been erased through religious, social, political, and legal discourses imposed through Western colonizing power. Ghisyawan's book is founded on the assertion that this coloniality of knowledge and power continues to define local, regional, and transnational perceptions of the region and its peoples. The continuous erasure of queerness and branding of the Caribbean region as the “most homophobic place on earth” is one instantiation of ongoing neocolonialism. As Ghisyawan writes, “Erotic Cartographies resists this discursive erasure of female same-sex desires and women who love women by demonstrating how these women take up and negotiate space while strategically employing embodiment, performance, and visibility” (13). Erotic Cartographies is fundamentally a decolonial project filled with narratives of same-sex loving women speaking against what is seen, heard, felt, and understood as “knowledge.”How does one write about, of, and against ongoing colonialism in the Caribbean region? Erotic Cartographies offers us “subjective mapping” as a method and methodology that makes visible the worldviews, worlds, and futures that remain invisible, unseen, or yet to be envisioned because of Western systems of knowledge, power, and being that rely on creating universal homogenous narratives premised on objectivity, rationalism, and scientific logics. Ghisyawan details the power of subjective maps to challenge these accepted Western ways of knowing and being that privilege “objective truths” by “centering embodied knowledge” (71). These subjective maps also express various relationships with temporality. Colonialists established a linear timeline situating nonindustrialized spaces like the Caribbean as “backward” and “underdeveloped” while absolving themselves of any responsibility for these perceived shortcomings. Ghisyawan's analysis of the maps produced by same-sex-loving women calls us to pause and reflect on the “fixity and linearity of time” (73) and the narrative of queer modernity that establishes the West as the leader in queer rights, despite its having instituted homophobia in the region through law and religion. Queer lives are not lived according to neoliberal and reproductive demands based on Western colonial notions of time, family, futurity, and modernity, all of which are normatively heterosexual. As a decolonial method, subjective mapping defies the logic of time and space by showing a “different vision of the world than that of Western colonial discourse” (73) and revealing that spaces, too, are not fixed or static. Instead, subjective mapping engages meaning-making as an ongoing process of (re)creating spaces.What makes subjective mapping different from other participatory methods? For Ghisyawan, maps are incomplete and incomprehensible without an understanding of the role of the erotic, which is the unlimited capacity residing within each human being to feel complete, present, and connected to one's body, mind, and soul—the fullness of the spirit that has been denied, interrupted, and fragmented by colonialism (19 – 20). Today's world, defined by mixed media, instantaneous access to information, and live-streamed experiences of the other, is saturated with immediate intimacies, connection, and transmittable “affects,” as purported by Deleuzian thought. Long before the “affective turn,” Audre Lorde offered us the “erotic” as an affective space, a source of unlimited power, energy, and knowledge-making if afforded the space and place within a colonial world. Subjective mapping is about how the erotic, as sexual, political, and spiritual interconnectedness, brings about a certain knowledge of the self and the world. The erotic, as a praxis of subjective self-making, enables new knowledge about the self and community and inspires the imagining of different possibilities.Erotic Cartographies is divided into three sections of paired chapters. Part 1introduces us to the Caribbean/Trinidadian space and its sexual practices and policies, followed by an extensive discussion of how and why “subjective mapping” is a decolonial tool and how it may be adapted and utilized. Part 2’s chapters challenge the public-private binaries that structure laws, norms, and practices related to home, mobility, privacy, and privilege. Chapter 3, “Being in Public,” examines how same-sex-loving women navigate local, national, and transnational spaces through their various social identities, forming “queer transnational subjectivities” (78); that is, same-sex-desiring women's experience of self is forged in and through their multiple embodiments of class, race, and gender in various spaces. Chapter 4 takes up home, homeland, family, and kinship questions, showing how the “private” sphere is not immune to violence, vulnerability, and threats. Through affective experiences of gossip, information, rumors, and respectability narratives, the home is reconfigured as a physical, affective, and imagined space of ongoing contestation, semi-outness, belonging, and love.Part 3, “State, Religion, and Personhood,” details colonialism's ongoing influence in Trinidad through religious nationalisms. Competing religious discourses of Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam are operative institutions that promote anti-homosexual rhetoric and emerge as “unsafe spaces.” Yet, same-sex-desiring women “used religious teaching and spiritual seeking to understand themselves as women-loving women. Spirituality, as a space, allows them to see aspects of themselves being reflected, which contradicts the dominant assumption that LGBTQI people reject religion and are rejected by it” (178). The women negotiate the boundaries of their same-sex desires and religious/spiritual beliefs, with some rejecting their religions, while others, through their erotic embodiment, reclaim spirituality “to nurture the self, the body, the mind, and the spirit” (170).In Erotic Cartographies, Ghisyawan offers scholars from multiple disciplines a unique, theoretically innovative method of analysis; subjective mapping is a revolutionary tool for decolonization. By locating subjective mapping and the erotic, Ghisyawan provides a new lens through which to analyze queer in the Caribbean region. By loosening the boundaries between local and global, self and other, religion and spirituality, public and private, and objectivity and subjectivity through mapping and erotic embodiments, Ghisyawan reprioritizes and illustrates the necessity of the self in knowledge production, shaping our world, and engaging in social transformation through art, activism, creativity, and embodied erotic practices. These willful and necessary acts of survival of black and brown queer bodies offer us a view of knowing, living, and being beyond the confines of boundaries, spaces, and time.