Wagadu: Queering Borders: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Global Heterosexism

Copyright © 2015 by Wagadu.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Mechthild Nagel

Queering Borders: Transnational Feminist Perspectives On Global Heterosexism

Kathryn Coffey

Contesting Heteronormality: Recasting Same-Sex Desire In China’s Past And Present

Tiantian Zheng

Queer(Y)Ing Permanent Partnership

Alix Olson

Encountering Metronormativity: Geographies Of Queer Visibility In Central New York

Sean Wang

Globetrotting Queerness: Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda

Minjeong Kim

Transformational Learning: Influence Of A Sexism And Heterosexism Course On Student Attitudes And Thought Development

Judith Ouellette And Laura Campbell

The Profession Feminism Left Behind: Heterosexism In Schooling And The Teaching Profession

Cynthia Benton

Of Studbroads And Strap-Ons: The Conflation Of Gender And Sexual Orientation By Female Prisoners In Texas As A Discipline Of Heteropatriarchal Normality

Cathy Marston

Review Of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization Of Lgbt People In The United States By Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, And Kay Whitlock, Beacon Press, 2011; African Sexual Diversity: Politics, Theory, Citizenship By S.n. Nyeck And Marc Epprecht (Eds.), Mcgill-Queens University Press, 2013.

Mechthild Nagel

Wagadu Editorial Team

Founding Editors

Mechthild Nagel, SUNY Cortland, United States

Nina Zimnik, Zuerich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland

Editor-in-Chief

Mechthild Nagel, SUNY Cortland

Managing Editor

Tiantian Zheng, Anthropology, SUNY Cortland

Book Review Editor

Kathryn Coffey, SUNY Cortland

New Media Review Editor

B. Jean Young, University of Georgia-Athens, United States

Technical Advisory Team

Justin Stewart and Julia Morog, SUNY Cortland

Assistant Editors at SUNY Cortland

Seth Nii Asumah, Africana Studies and Political Science

Lynn E. Couturier, Physical Education

Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, Philosophy

Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo, Geography

Brett Troyan, History

Linguistic Advisory Board

Thaddeus Blanchette, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Hongli Fan, SUNY Cortland

Colleen Kattau, SUNY Cortland

Kassim Kone, SUNY Cortland

Marie Pontario, SUNY Cortland

Robert Pontario, SUNY Cortland

Paulo Quaglio, SUNY Cortland

Advisory Board

Carole Boyce Davies, Cornell University, United States

Fatima El-Tayeb, UC San Diego, United States

Ann Ferguson, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, United States

Ruth Gilmore, CUNY Graduate Center, United States

Margaret Grieco, Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, University of Giessen, Germany

Sandra Harding, UCLA, United States

Alison M Jaggar, University of Colorado at Boulder, United States

Siga Jagne, The Gambia

Suad Joseph, UC Davis, United States

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University, United States

Julia C. Oparah, Mills College, United States

Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, University of California, Irvine, United States

Riche D Richardson, Cornell University, United States

Andrea Maihofer, Universität Basel, Switzerland

Patricia MacFadden, Zimbabwe & Swaziland

Mmatshilo Motsei, South Africa

Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo, Syracuse University, United States

Julia Chinyere Oparah, Mills College, United States

Thelma Pinto, Professor Emerita, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, United States

Sonita Sarker, Macalester College, United States

Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, Boston College, United States

Gayatri C. Spivak, Columbia University, United States

Editorial Board

Carola Bauschke-Urban, Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Germany

Himika Bhattacharya, Syracuse University, United States

Liat Ben-Moshe, The University of Toledo, United States

Helen Codd, University of Central Lancashire, England

Susan Dewey, University of Wyoming, United States

Ramona Mihăilă, Spiru Haret University, Bucharest, Romania

Lubna Nazir Chaudhry, Binghamton University, United States

Naminata Diabate, Cornell University, United States

Franziska Dübgen, Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen, Germany

Shelley Feldman, Cornell University, United States

Namita Goswami, Indiana State University, United States

Saida Hodžić, Cornell University, United States

Gladys M. Jiménez-Muñoz, Binghamton University, United States

Nikolay Karkov, SUNY Cortland, United States

Florence Margai, Binghamton University, United States

Bill Martin, Binghamton University, United States

Sharon M Meagher, University of Scranton, United States

S.N. Nyeck, Clarkson University, United States

Mariana Ortega, John Carroll University, United States

Oyeronke Oyewumi, Stony Brook University, United States

Angel Adams Parham, Loyola University, United States

Monika Platek, University of Warsaw, Poland

Mahua Sarkar, Binghamton University, United States

Rashad Shabazz, University of Vermont, United States

Cheryl Sterling, CUNY, United States

Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, University of Iceland, Iceland

Tushabe, Kansas State University, United States

Preface

Mechthild Nagel, Editor-in-Chief

From the academy to the streets, members of the LGBTQ community and their allies are challenging global heterosexism. This special issue of Wagadu, edited by Kathryn Coffey, Associate Professor of Health at SUNY Cortland, NY, USA, is dedicated to an interdisciplinary, intersectional, multi-movement, and multi-dimensional critique of heterosexism, from a global social justice queer perspective.

With this volume, Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies launches its seventh print edition dedicated to engaging feminist theory and practice in a postcolonial context. The journal is supported by the dedicated faculty and staff of the State University of New York, College at Cortland, USA. We continue to receive support from a diverse and international advisory and editorial board membership, making Wagadu one of the few notable postcolonial and feminist journals (online or in print). We thank the office of the president of SUNY Cortland and the William Haines Fund for funding the publication of this special issue.

We hope you will find this volume engaging as the authors grapple with the intersecting discourses on human rights, and social justice.

Wagadu: What’s in a Name?

Wagadu—the Soninke name of the Ghana Empire—controlled the present-day Mali, Mauritania and Senegal and was famous for its prosperity and power from approximately 300-1076. It constituted the bridge between North Africa, the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds and Southern Africa. Ghana gave birth to the two most powerful West African Empires: Mali and Songhay. The modern country of Ghana (former British Gold Coast) derives its name from the Ghana Empire.

Legend says that Ghana’s power derived from a mythic python, which generated the rich gold deposits and controlled the fortunes of the empire. Year after year the people of Ghana had to offer the most beautiful virgin to the python as a sacrifice. One year, the distressed fiancé of a sacrificial girl took a sword and beheaded the mythic python in a preemptive move. The head flew and crashed into the parts of West Africa that became gold producing regions leading to the rise of the Mali Empire. Ghana fell after seven years of drought and poverty forced the Ghana people, the Soninke, to disperse and adopt exodus as a way of life to this day.

Why Wagadu? Wagadu has come to be the symbol of the sacrifice women continue to make for a better world. Wagadu has become the metaphor for the role of women in the family, community, country, and planet. The excerpt below from a Soninke song best summarizes this state of fact:

Duna taka siro no yagare npale

The world does not go without women.

Cortland, October 2014

Wagadu, Journal of Transnational Women’s

and Gender Studies

Volume 12

Special Issue 2014:

Queering Borders:

Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Global Heterosexism

QUEERING BORDERS: TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON GLOBAL HETEROSEXISM

Editor, Kathryn Coffey

Associate Professor of Health, Health Department

at SUNY Cortland, Cortland New York

Traditionally, transnational feminists have examined the fields of gender, sexuality and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) studies by critically addressing issues of colonialism, white supremacy, globalization, capitalism, and heterosexism. Like most fields within higher education, gender and sexuality studies, women’s studies, and LGBTQ studies are still dominated by white scholars; moreover these are predominately scholars from colonial ‘western’ cultures. In 2010 in the journal Pedagogy, Donald E. Hall asks the question: Can queer studies be taught across borders? Many universities and activist groups are arguing for a global queer community and movement for rights, protection, and freedoms for members of LGBTQ communities. From the academy to the streets, members of the LGBTQ community and their allies are challenging global heterosexism. This special issue of Wagadu is dedicated to an interdisciplinary, intersectional, multi-movement, and multi-dimensional critique of heterosexism, from a global social justice queer perspective.

Outside of LGBTQ and ally communities and the world of Queer studies, the general public may understand sex, gender and sexuality as binary constructs: There are males and females, and males should be masculine and sexually attracted to females while females should be feminine and sexually attracted to males. Even within Queer studies, some scholars have chosen to hold on to the binary of gay and straight identity but over time, Queer studies has created an intentional shift from the binary to a more intentional fluidity within gender and orientation. Scholarly journals, including Wagadu, purposefully publish manuscripts that embody this notion of fluidity and intersectionality of gender and orientation. These fluid and multidimensional constructs include male, female, cisgender, trans*, which can include transgender, transsexual, gender queer and gender fluid, intersexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual and heterosexual. Among LGBTQ communities and scholars, there is still a debate about whether to include the T and Q in the acronym. The varied trans* community often has different concerns and needs as the gay community. And queer, a term reclaimed from a derogatory slur, to that of pride, can be used as an overarching label that encompasses anyone with non-conforming gender identity and/or sexual orientation. Hall (2010) considers the challenge of defining the term queer as it can be used as a broad social identifier or a term based in poststructuralist theory. Others have transformed and expanded queer to be inclusive of the interrelationship of gender, race and class. Building on E. Patrick Johnson’s (2001) use of the term "Quare as an alliteration of queer and queer theory to include race and class, Lee (2003) coins the term kuaer as a transliteration, using the pinyin system, of two Mandarin Chinese characters kua and er" (p. 165). Unlike much of queer theory, Lee’s kuaer theory is race-conscious, womanist and transnational. These additions speak to the critiques of queer theory being by and about a homogenous population.

Heteronormality and heteronormativity are prejudices that favor heterosexuality as the norm and have a biased against those in the queer community. Heteronormality/heteronormativity is the view that all humans are either male or female in gender and sex, and that biological sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender roles are in alignment from a heterosexual point of view.

In this Special Edition of Wagadu, we explore the concept of a global queer community and examine multiple critiques of institutionalized heterosexism starting with the analysis of changing meanings of same sex desire in China, to challenging heterosexist U.S. immigration laws. We then examine the notion of metronormativity in Central New York and heteronormativity in China and Jamaica is analyzed through a queer reading of The Pagoda. Lastly, we study U.S. college students’ attitudes toward the LGBTQ community and explore heterosexism in public school curricula.

Within this volume, Tiantian Zheng gives an historical account of same-sex desire and it’s changing meanings in homoerotic romance in China in her article Contesting Heteronormality: Recasting Same-sex Desire in China’s Past and Present. Zheng demonstrates that culture and political context produce sexual meanings and practices. From the imperial period, Republican era, Maoist times, and the post-socialist era, she links the past to the present as she works to contest the current discourse of heteronormality.

Dating back to the year 2000, marriage equality is federally sanctioned in 17 countries globally. More recently in the U.S., LGBTQ equality was influenced by the 2011 repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell legislation and the 2013 Supreme Court strike down of section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act. Since 2004, States have been falling like dominoes to legalize marriage equality. As of this publication, 35 states and the District of Columbia have full marriage equality. However, in Russia and Uganda, there is a new push to spread legalized and institutionalized homophobia including encouraging violence against gays and lesbians. Other countries such as Dominica, Italy, Yemen, Jamaica and other African countries such as Nigeria and Zimbabwe have varying formal laws and social stigmas against homosexuality. This begs the question, how can multiple nations come to such opposing conclusions about the LGBTQ community?

When examining this issue from a more wide-ranging, socio-ecologic perspective, Sykes-Kelleher discusses how the currant global governance system, run by dominant nations, controls less dominant nations by fear and force (2012, p. 13). She cites de Sousa Santos’ view that those dominant nations create the non-existence of the dominated by multiple means including the classification of people that normalizes differences and hierarchies enables racial and sexual classifications, for example, to be used as means of exclusion and to create dominator societies (as cited in Sykes-Kelleher, 2012, p. 14). Using ideas from the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO), Sykes-Kelleher suggests that an equitable governance system is possible by shifting from the current neoliberalism to the more equitable neohumanism paradigm. This would in turn decrease the hierarchies of sexual classifications.

Jackson (2009) echoes Hall (2009) and LeBlanc (2013) regarding the emergence of a global queerness or a global queer presence which often stems from a Western (mostly U.S.) influence that does not appreciate the diversity of queers and queer communities across the globe. However, he describes cultural globalization and the existence of certain global elements of a queer community that are evident in very different cultures across the globe. Jackson (2009) focuses on capitalisms playing a role in global queerness starting at the local level, moving to the national and lastly the transnational level. He contends, however, that a postmodern rhetoric is focused on the promotion of global queerness to the detriment of local uniqueness. Jackson recognizes the importance of capitalism’s impact on the local culture and performance of queerness, while at the same time, he appreciates the reciprocal effect of local agency and how that builds global queerness (Jackson, 2009).

In 2007, Puar developed the concept of homonationalism which is understanding the complexities of how ‘acceptance’ and ‘tolerance’ for gay and lesbian subjects have become a barometer by which the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated (p. 336). However, in her 2013 work Rethinking Homonationalism Puar reiterates and rethinks the concept:

Homonationalism, thus, is not simply a synonym for gay racism, or another way to mark how gay and lesbian identities became available to conservative political imaginaries; it is not another identity politics, not another way of distinguishing good queers from bad queers, not an accusation, and not a position. It is rather a facet of modernity and a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by nation-states, a constitutive and fundamental reorientation of the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexuality. To say that this historical moment is homonational, where homonationalism is understood as an analytics of power, then, means that one must engage it in the first place as the condition of possibility for national and transnational politics (p. 337).

To further explain, Puar uses the example of Israel and Palestine: Israel practices homonationalism by encouraging LGBTQ rights of some Israeli’s (pinkwashing) while increasing segregation of Palestinians. The U.S. assists in this pinkwashing through financial support, but more specifically by political capital and financial resources that invest in Israel. U.S. settler colonialism is inextricably intertwined with Israeli settler colonialism. Through their financial, military, affective, and ideological entwinement, it seems to me that the United States and Israel are the largest benefactors of homonationalism… (Puar, 2013, p. 338).

In this volume of Wagadu, Alix Olson examines the discourses surrounding the push for the Uniting American Families Act and how the Act is influencing the current path of homonational citizenship. In Queer(y)ing Permanent Partnership, Olson draws on Puar’s conception of homonationalism to position current LGBTQ immigration advocacy within the broader set of neoliberal assimilationist practices. Olson’s aim is to continue the dialogue to conceptualize alternatives to the alienating production that is part of the current immigration reforms.

In 2013/14, prior to and during the Sochi Winter Olympic Games, there was a global, albeit significantly Western, adverse response to Russia’s 2012 legislation that banned propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships. Western LGBTQ rights advocates came together to protest the hosting of the Games in Sochi because of the legislation and its inequitable effect on gay Olympians and fans in Sochi.

With the 2012 law, banning gay pride parades results in a lack of mainstream visibility of the LGBTQ community in Russia. LeBlanc (2013) suggests that support from a global community does not necessarily improve life for LGBTQ Russians. He suggests that the Western approach (which is often mistaken for the global approach) in advocating for LGBTQ rights is not necessarily efficacious in the Russian culture because, using the LGBTQ community as a scapegoat, the Russian government positions gays as a threat to the Russian culture. Heller (2007) suggests that the Russian resistance to LGBTQ rights is yet another force that holds the Russian culture together which in turn continues homophobia and heteronormativity (as cited in LeBlanc, 2013). According to LeBlanc, it is a politically useful time for the imaginative global LGBTQ community to demonstrate national and transnational ties against the goliath Russian homophobia. However, that demonizes Russia, which is hypocritical of some self-purported liberal and gay-friendly Western states whose LGBTQ citizens still do not have equal rights. "The insistence of