Sexualities/queer identities

Abstract

From the mainstream success of the US cable network Showtime’s lesbian television series The L Word, to the global embrace of the It Gets Better project aimed at lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth, the media are central to the mainstreaming and re-visioning of sexual identity. Niche television programming and interactive social media have also opened up new arenas to showcase heterogeneous sexual practices. Of particular significance in this chapter is the representation of racialized queer identities. In the two decades since the emergence of queer race studies, scholarship on queer identities has developed in tandem with sexuality, postcolonial, and diasporic studies. I will explore the limitations, exclusions, and possibilities of queer identities through the connections between these theoretical fields, considering the mutually constitutive categories of sexuality and race as a set of practices; as desire; and as identity and post-identity politics. This chapter revisits the history of queer race studies in the light of today’s“post-gay” and “post-racial” environment with two focal points. The first attends to the specific methods and sites in which queer race interventions have emerged, in particular media analyses on interracial sexual encounters, such as independent art house and experimental cinema, and gay Asian porn. The second explores media in terms of queer race identities in relation to neoliberalism and postmodern racism; specifically, practices of queer mobility illustrated by marriage equality and sexual migration. These aims highlight changes in the way racialized sexualities have been constituted, from the early margins of subcultural media, to the center of mainstream forces that mediate new power hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion. I begin with independent film, online porn, magazines, and situated media, look-ing back to radicalized sexuality as a set of practices tied to the emergence of modern sex and racism, and examining “Oriental sex” as a form of Western desire. Second, I examine black gay cinema and photography. I problematize identity politics by locating the critical combinations of voice, enunciation, and intersectionality as central to early scholarship on queer race studies. Third, I evaluate media texts of queer mobility as represented in gay travel guidebooks, queer asylum reports, and newspapers. I situate historical developments of racialized sexuality and identity politics against contemporary articulations on homonationalism, and question the politics of sexualized racism that govern practices of queer neoliberalism. I argue that the challengefor a post-identity queer race studies is to attend to the politics of a queer mobility that resists assimilation to a “post-gay” and “post-racial” settlement.