Why does communication need transnational queer studies?

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I argue for the need to embrace transnationalism as an epistemological and methodological intervention in communication studies. Centering how non-Western racialized queer experiences rearticulate queer theory, transnational queer studies can serve as an intellectual tool to expand and revise our imaginations of being queer as well as a critique to rethink and reimagine the political and intellectual future of our discipline.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational
• queer
• culture
• whiteness
• geopolitics

Notes

1 Martin Manalansan IV, “Queer Intersections: Sexuality and Gender in Migration Studies,” International Migration Review 40, no.1 (2006): 224–49; Meredith Raimondo and Cindy Patton, “Guest Editors’ Introduction,” Feminist Media Studies 2, no.1 (2002): 5–18; Paula Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” Cultural Studies 1, no. 3 (Winter, 1987): 263–305.

2 Manalansan, “Queer Intersections,” 228.

3 Elizabeth Povinelli and George Chauncey, “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally: An Introduction,” GLQ 5, no. 4 (1999): 439–50.

4 See Paula Chakravartty and others, “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication, 68, no. 2 (2018): 254–66; Gust Yep, “Further Notes on Healing from ‘The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies,’” QED 4, no. 2 (2017): 115–22; Raka Shome and Radha Hegde, “Postcolonial Approaches to Communication: Charting the Terrain, Engaging the Intersection,” Communication Theory 12, no. 3 (2002): 249–70; and Raka Shome, “Transnational Feminism and Communication Studies,” The Communication Review, 9, no. 4 (2006): 255–67.

5 Shinsuke Eguchi and Bernadette Calafell, “Introduction: Reorienting Queer Intercultural Communicaiton,” in Queer Intercultural Communication:The Intersectional Politics of Belonging in and Across Differences, eds. Shinsuke Eguchi and Bernadette Calafell (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 4–5.

6 Gust Yep, Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui, and Ryan Lescure, “Relationalities in/through Difference: Explorations in Queer Intercultural Communication,” in Queer Intercultural Communication: The Intersectional Politics of Belonging in and Across Differences, eds. Shinsuke Eguchi and Bernadette Calafell (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 31.

7 Petrus Liu, “Why Does Queer Theory Need China?,” Positions 18, no. 2 (2010): 291–320.

8 Godfried Asante, “Queerly Ambivalent: Navigating Global and Local Normativities in Postcolonial Ghana,” in Queer Intercultural Communication: The Intersectional Politics of Belonging in and Across Differences, eds. Shinsuke Eguchi and Bernadette Calafell (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 173.

9 Povinelli and Chauncey, “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally,” 443.

10 Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Sexualities,” GLQ 7, no. 4 (2001): 663–79; and Petrus Liu and Lisa Rofel, “Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics,” Positions 18, no. 2 (2010): 281–9.

11 Grewal and Kaplan, “Global Identities,” 671.

12 Ibid.

13 See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); and Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

14 Roberta Chevrette, “Outing Heteronormativity in Interpersonal and Family Communication,” Communication Theory 23, no. 2 (2013): 170–90; and Gust Yep, “The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies: Notes on Injury, Healing, and Queer World-Making,” Journal of Homosexuality 45, no. 2 (2003): 11–59.

15 Chevrette, “Outing Heteronormativity”; Susan Owen, “Disciplining ‘Sextext’: Queers, Fears, and Communication Studies,” Journal of Homosexuality 45, no. 2 (2003): 297–317; and Yep, “The Violence of Heteronormativity.”

16 Yep, “The Violence of Heteronormativity.”

17 Chevrette, “Outing Heteronormativity”; and Yep, “The Violence of Heteronormativity,” 17.

18 Yep, Alaoui and Lescure, “Relationalities in/Through Difference.”

19 Shome and Hegde, “Postcolonial Approaches to Communication”; and Cindy Patton, “Official Maps,” In Globalizing AIDS (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 51–113.

20 Asante, “Queerly Ambivalent”; Shuzhen Huang and Daniel Brouwer, “Negotiating Performances of “Real” Marriage in Chinese Queer Xinghun,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 2 (2018): 140–58; and Yep, Alaoui and Lescure, “Relationalities in/through Difference.”

21 Yep, Alaoui and Lescure, “Relationalities in/through Difference,” 20.

22 Liu and Rofel, “Beyond the Strai(gh)ts,” 283.

23 Liu, “Queer Theory Need China,” 314.

24 Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way, “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis,” American Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2008): 625.

25 Liu, “Queer Theory Need China.”

26 Ibid., 314.

27 Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ 12, no. 4 (2006): 570.

28 Marwan Kraidy, “Hybridity in Cultural Globalization,” Communication Theory 12, no. 3 (2002): 316–39.

29 Karma Chávez, “Pushing Boundaries: Queer Intercultural Communication,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6, no. 2 (2013): 83–95.

30 Gust Yep, “Queering/Quaring/Kauering/Crippin’/Transing ‘Other Bodies’ in Intercultural Communication,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6, no. 2 (2013): 118–26; and Gust Yep, “Toward Thicker Intersectionalities: Theorizing, Researching, and Activating the Complexities of Communication and Identities,” in Globalizing Intercultural Communication: A Reader, eds. Kathryn Sorrells and Sachi Sekimoto (Los Angeles: Sage, 2016), 85–93.

31 Briggs, McCormick, and Way, “Transnationalism,” 632.

32 Homi Bhabha, “The Third Space,” in Identity: Community, Culture Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 90–118; and Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

33 Rona Halualani and Tom Nakayama, “Critical Intercultural Communication Studies: At a Crossraods,” in The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, eds. Tom Nakayama and Rona Halualani (West Sussex: Blackwell, 2010), 2–3.

34 Shome, “Transnational Feminism,” 255.

35 Grewal and Kaplan, “Global Identities,” 668.

36 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1999), 4.

37 Ahmet Atay, “Intercultural Queer Slippages and Translations,” in Queer Intercultural Communication, eds. Shinsuke Eguchi and Bernadette Calafell (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 141.

38 J. Blake Scott and Rebecca Dingo, “Introduction,” in Megarhetorics of Global Development, eds. Rebecca Dingo and J. Blake Scott (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 7.

39 Dreama Moon, “Concept of ‘Culture’: Implications for Intercultural Communication Research,” Communication Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1996); and Dreama Moon, “Critical Reflections on Culture and Critical Intercultural Communication,” in The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, eds. Tom Nakayama and Rona Halualani (West Sussex: Blackwell, 2010).

40 Briggs, McCormick, and Way, “Transnationalism,” 644.

41 Shome and Hegde, “Postcolonial Approaches to Communication,” 267, 264.

42 Povinelli and Chauncey, “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally,” 443.

43 Liu and Rofel, “Beyond the Strai(gh)ts,” 283.

44 Scott and Dingo, “Introduction” in Dingo and Scott; and Wendy Hesford and Eileen Schell, “Configurations of Transnationality: Locating Feminist Rhetorics,” College English 75, no. 5 (2008): 461–70.

45 Nancy Fraser, “What’s Critical About Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender,” New German Critique, no. 35 (1985): 97.