Time, Queerness and Global Politics
摘要
DURING STOCKHOLM PRIDE 2019, the far-right party Sweden Democrats, with a record of opposing all pro-LGBTQ reforms domestically, proposed to cut foreign aid to countries criminalizing same-sex relations.This is an example of how "gay-friendly" narratives displacing homophobia onto racialized, Global South Others are incorporated into nationalism.However, it also shows how queerness functions as a global political signifier, the meaning of which changes across time and space.In nineteenth-century Victorian discourse, the imposition of "modern" heteronormative ideals through colonial sodomy bans was seen as a way to civilize savages.In contrast, in our time, LGBTQ rights are sometimes a marker of being "on the right side of history".Queerness thus switches place in relation to the colonizer/colonized binary and ideas of modernity.For Rahul Rao, this exemplifies how queer politics are structured by time, including memories of the past and imaginations of the future.His new book asks how time matters in the queer postcolony, and specifically how the afterlives of British colonialism in Uganda, India and Britain shape contemporary queer politics.Rao situates his contribution in relation to queer theories on temporality, which have criticized mainstream LGBTQ politics for being attached to an