Queering postcolonial travel writing

ABSTRACT

Beginning with contemporary calls to decolonise travel writing, this article considers the intersection of race and sexuality in the genre. Why is the analysis of postcolonial travel writing so straight? Why is the analysis of queer travel writing so white? By answering these questions simultaneously, the article argues for the creation of a space from which we can understand how single-issue approaches to identity politics fail to take account of structural forms of homophobia and racism. Acknowledging their structural manifestations through the history of colonialism should advance an understanding of how and why some of the most historically queer-inclusive and diverse places in the world have come to be represented as the most hostile to queers in travel writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer
• LGBTQI
• decolonial
• postcolonial

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 While the authors referenced in this article deliberately work around and against the practices and markets of global LGBTQ tourism, their operations are important to the way discourses of “safety” and “desire” are constructed, as well as to those of gender, race and class. For more on this topic, see Pritchard et al. (2000); Frohlick (2013); Casey and Thurnell-Read (2014); Padilla (2008), and Williams (2013). A recent media example of the intersection between LGBTQ tourism and debates about global queer rights is Vice’s Gaycation which demonstrates how mainstream media representations of global queer life are focalised through the privileged experience of the mobile middle-class white tourist against the objectified black/brown/working-class queer body at risk from attack or discrimination (Rault 2017).

2 Schulman’s work draws on Judith Butler’s work on witnessing as an ethical act (2004), and Donna Haraway’s practice of “feminist positionality” (1991) which has become a foundational methodology for modern feminist criticism which emphasises that all knowledge is partial, contingent, and relies on the perspective/position of the viewer.

3 John C. Hawley’s edited collection Post-colonial, Queer (2001) is an important example of multidisciplinary approaches to a racialised understanding of who or what the “global gay” might be. For instance, Dennis Altman identifies the emergence of a “public homosexual world” (Altman 2001, 26) and the dominance of emotional, as well as sexual, relationships between (often) men as part of a differentiating discourse about “modern” gay or LGBTQ culture. Another important edited collection is Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin F. Manalansan’s Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Aftermath of Colonialism (2002). For a recent overview of the impact of the queer postcolonial in literary studies, see Donna McCormack’s Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing (2014). Similar to these studies, “queer” in this discussion is an umbrella term used in a variety of senses: “To be queer is an identity; to live queer life is embodiment; to do queer things is action, doing something queerly/queering something are processes” (Chatterjee 2018). LGBTQ in this discussion will be used to describe specific historical and political movements, identities, and policies.

4 Spatial metaphors have been at the centre of postcolonial studies of travel writing, especially in terms of thinking about the encounter with power and its potential disruption. Mary Louise Pratt’s oft-quoted definition of the “contact zone” continues to provide the fundamental framework for describing the encounter between cultures. Contact zones are: “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of dominion and subordination – such as colonialism and slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (Pratt 1992, 8). This model is a useful starting point, but is not sensitive to how sexuality and intimacy may have the capacity to work against the operation of particular asymmetries, as well as reproduce them. Pratt’s work has been followed up by a body of postcolonial travel criticism which argues that, “postcolonial travel writing is not just oppositional or a ‘writing back’; it offers frames of reference that exist outside the boundaries of European knowledge production” (Edwards and Grauland 2012, 3).

5 While there have been major overviews of postcolonial travel writing including Edwards and Grauland (2012), and Clarke (2017), they have contained minimal accounts of queer life beyond highly influential individual figures such as Jan Morris. In studies of gay travel writing, including work by Gregory Woods (2015), there has been minimal attention to the intersection between race and sexuality.

6 Drawing on the work of Lauren Berlant and Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed’s account of feeling as a queer practice has been important for making critical space for fleeting or tentative encounters with power: “This analysis of how we ‘feel our way’ approaches emotion as a form of cultural politics or world making” (Ahmed 2004, 12).

7 For a recent reading of the digital and the queer postcolonial see Dasgupta (2017).

8 For a more extensive discussion of Burton’s Sotadic Zone in the context of travel writing, see Phillips (1999).

9 This argument has been the basis of postcolonial critiques of the study of sexuality: “The study of the postcolonial nationalisms of the so-called Third World continues to be quasi-uniformly based on the presupposition of an unexamined totalizing signifier: universalized heterosexuality” (Bacchetta 1999, 141).

10 These maps are recommended viewing by gov.uk for LGBTQ travellers and tourists abroad.

11 For recent discussions of how Muslims’ identities have been used as the queer’s “hateful others”, see Jin Haritaworn (2015). For a discussion of how Muslim religious identities have been viewed as incompatible with LGBTQ identities, see Rahman (2010), Hendricks (2016) and Siraj (2016).

12 Gregory Woods’s Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World (2016) and Frédéric Martel, Global Gay: How Gay Culture is Changing the World (2018) are recent examples of texts which directly engage with the growth of LGBTQ political and cultural movements with larger social and cultural transformations. A useful recent overview of how LGBTQ rights have been weaponised by the Global North, see Dennis Altman and Jonathan Symons, Queer Wars (2016).