the queer third world

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Third World Quarterly

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The queer Third World

Ilan Kapoor

To cite this article: Ilan Kapoor (2015) The queer Third World, Third World Quarterly, 36:9,1611-1628, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1058148

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1058148

Published online: 25 Sep 2015.

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The queer Third WorldIlan Kapoor*Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada

This article attempts to align ‘queer’ and ‘Third World’ – groupingthem in their common inheritance of subjugation and disparagementand their shared allegiance to non-alignment and a politics aimed atdisrupting domination and the status quo. In assembling both termsone is struck by how, in the mainstream discourse of internationaldevelopment, the Third World comes off looking remarkably queer:under Western eyes it has often been constructed as perverse, abnor-mal and passive. Its sociocultural values and institutions are seen asdeviantly strange – backward, effete, even effeminate. Its economicdevelopment is depicted as abnormal, always needing to emulate theWest, yet never living up to the mark (‘emerging’ perhaps, but neverquite arriving). For their part, postcolonial Third World nation-stateshave tended to disown and purge such queering – by denying theirqueerness; indeed often characterising it as a ‘Western import’ – yetat the same time imitating the West and pursuing neoliberal capitalistgrowth. I want not only to make the claim that the Western and ThirdWorld stances are two sides of the same discourse but, drawing onLacanian queer theory, also to suggest that a ‘queer Third World’would better transgress this discourse by embracing queerness as thesite of structural negativity and destabilising politics.

Keywords: queer; Third World; development; Orientalism; colonialsexual politics; hetero-normativity; homophobia; Lacanian queertheory; radical politics

IntroductionThere is more than a certain affinity between ‘queer’ and ‘Third World’. Indeed,the derogatory epithet ‘queer’ was reclaimed by gay and lesbian activists duringthe 1980s–90s North American AIDS crisis to frame a new politics of gayliberation. As a result, in contrast to mainstream lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgen-der and intersex (LGBTI) politics, which has most often centred on a liberalpolitics of identity and rights, queer politics has come to signify a more radicalpolitics – an interrogation and disruption of social norms. For its part the term‘Third World’, despite its current pejorative connotations of poverty, instabilityand the ‘third rate’, possesses notably principled origins: it was coined by

*Email: [email protected]

© 2015 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com

Third World Quarterly, 2015Vol. 36, No. 9, 1611–1628, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1058148

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French demographer Alfred Sauvy and became popular after the 1955 BandungConference, at which the leaders of newly independent states (Nasser, Nehru, UNu, Sukarno) articulated a programme of political non-alignment. The intentwas to chart a new global arrangement (subsequently called the ‘New Interna-tional Economic Order’) that steered clear of either capitalist or communist blocrivalries.

What ‘queer’ and ‘Third World’ thus have in common is a politics of non-conformity and dissidence. Both arise from a history of subjugation, attemptingto resist and destabilise domination and the power of the status quo. Both oper-ate from the margins, questioning normalising power mechanisms and socialorder, while upholding a deviant, non-conformist and non-assimilationist poli-tics. And both are associated with equally negative and disparaging discursiveconnotations – the one attempting to reclaim such meanings in favour of a radi-cal politics, the other stemming from a (failed) progressive politics of develop-ment that now awaits recuperation. My aim in this article is to try and alignboth concepts, that is, to group them in their common inheritance of subjugationand disparagement and their shared allegiance precisely to non-alignment and aradical politics (of development).

In assembling both terms, in fact, one is struck by how, in the mainstreamdiscourse of international development, the Third World comes off lookingremarkably queer: under Western eyes, it has often been constructed as perverse,abnormal and passive. Its sociocultural values and institutions are seen asdeviantly strange – backward, effete, even effeminate. Its economic developmentis depicted as abnormal, always needing to emulate the West, yet never livingup to the mark (‘emerging’ perhaps, but never quite arriving). For their part,despite the inheritance of Bandung,1 postcolonial Third World nation-states havetended to disown and purge such queering – by denying their queerness and, infact, often characterising it as a ‘Western import’ – yet at the same time imitat-ing the West, modernising and Westernising sociocultural institutions, and pursu-ing neoliberal capitalist growth. I want not only to make the claim that theWestern and Third World stances are two sides of the same discourse but, draw-ing on Lacanian queer theory, also to suggest that a ‘queer Third World’ wouldbetter transgress this discourse by embracing queerness as the site of structuralnegativity and destabilising politics.

Before teasing out these arguments, a clarificatory note on my use of theword ‘queer’. It is often employed as an umbrella term for LBGTI and, while I,too, will use it in that sense to an extent, in this article I am more interested inits political sense of deviant, perverse or resistant to normalising practices. Inmany ways the latter meaning is incompatible with the former, since queernessis precisely a questioning of fixed identity, no matter whether gay or straight.Moreover, to the extent that queerness is about deviancy from social norms, it isnot restricted to issues of sexuality, but can apply equally to categories of race,economy, nation or gender (hence my attempt at grouping it with ‘Third World’as metaphor for ‘non-aligned’). Nonetheless, the notion of queerness has grownout of the particular historical experience of marginalisation of queers as a sex-ual minority, which has shed light not just on questions of sexual perversity, buton a range of normalising practices that my analysis will attempt to highlight.

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Queerness and the WestAccording to Foucault, homosexuality is a Western construct of the 19thcentury, at which time it became a site of systematic legal, religious and medicalinvestigation.2 Before that period ‘sodomy’ and same-sex relations did of coursehappen; but, though considered ‘sinful’ and always at risk of being suppressedand harshly punished, such sexually ‘deviant’ practices also had a certain degreeof social acceptance, with even a few instances of flourishing in urban subcul-tures. It was only in the late 19th century that ‘sexual perversion’ began to bescrutinised, classified and pathologised (as a disease), giving way to the modernnotion of homosexuality. ‘The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; thehomosexual was now a species’, writes Foucault.3

But whether in pre-modern or modern times, queerness has a history ofmarginalisation and oppression. Hetero-normativity – the social ordering thatprivileges heterosexuality and accepts as normal and natural the complementar-ity between the sexes — has meant the simultaneous production of sexualminorities as ‘queer’, abnormal, unnatural, defective. Lee Edelman calls this‘reproductive futurism’: Western society sustains itself on the promise of aharmonious future by upholding the image of the innocent child to buttresssocial reproduction and the ‘absolute privilege of heteronormativity’.4 Genera-tional succession is ensured, then, through a forward-looking reproductivepolitics of hope. And, according to such a politics, to the extent that queers donot procreate (at least not until the advent of in vitro fertilisation), they do notreproduce the social. Indeed, they are often seen as threatening key socialinstitutions: their lack of family orientation compromises such things as commu-nity and civil society, while their ‘sterile’ and non-reproductive ‘lifestyle’endangers capitalism, which so depends on labour and wealth accumulation.

No wonder, as a consequence, that queers in the West have been subjectedto torment through the ages. One thinks here of the castration of ‘effeminate’young boys in the Middle Ages, the vilification and persecution of homosexuals(as well as women, witches, Muslims, Jews and the poor) during the Crusadesand Inquisition, and the execution of ‘sodomites’ under the 16th-century EnglishBuggery Act.5 More recent, often right-wing and conservative attacks againstqueers include the Nazi persecution of gay men (alongside Jews and Gypsies),anti-homosexual discrimination during McCarthy’s anti-communist purge in theUSA, and the Anita Bryant ‘Save Our Children’ crusade against gay rights inthe late-1970s. All speak to attempts at preserving the social fabric, and hencereforming or eliminating queers as an embodiment of the threat to reproductivefuturism.

Of late, a much more liberal approach to queerness has taken hold in theWest (and other parts of the world, too). Contemporary liberalism now treatshomosexuality as a sexual expression, lifestyle and identity, granting sexualminorities legal rights and protections, including gay marriage. This mainstream-ing of LGBTI identities is reflected in liberal political economy as well, withqueers targeted by mass-media and lifestyle marketing. ‘Out is In’, or so the slo-gan goes. Rather than being treated as a limit or threat to the social, the queernon-reproductive lifestyle is now a marketing and consumer opportunity.

But, as several queer theorists have been quick to point out,6 such ‘queerliberalism’ tends to leave hetero-normativity intact. It deals with sex as a

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personal or civil rights issue, thus avoiding broader structural change. In fact,far from posing a threat to the social order, queer liberalism helps reinforce it: itcontinues to uphold reproductive futurism by buttressing the institutions of mar-riage, family, domesticity and nation, while also strengthening and promotinghetero-patriarchal global capitalism through niche marketing and consumerism.

Queering the Third WorldIt should come as no surprise that, before decolonisation, the discursive repre-sentations of queerness in the West found their way into European colonialrepresentations of the Third World. Indeed, as several postcolonial analysts haveargued,7 colonial domination was often justified and exercised through variousforms of homophobia (as well as sexism and racism). Queering the Third Worldenabled the coloniser to distinguish himself from the colonised, buttressing hismasculinity and social respectability and, as a result, rationalising both his‘civilising mission’ and denigration of local culture.

Thus, early colonial reports represented Amerindians in Colombia as sexualdeviants and degenerates, engaging in ‘bestiality, sodomy, incest, and otherunnatural practices’.8 Similarly 16th and 17th century European travel journalsreferred to Africans as ‘hot-tempered’ and ‘lascivious’,9 with historian andcolonial administrator, Edward Long, describing African women as‘libidinous...monkeys’.10 Black men and women were frequently reduced to theirbodies (or to animality), lacking cognitive abilities or self-control, and invariablydepicted as unintelligible, deceptive and dishonest.11 In this regard, Eve Sedgwick,writing about the ‘closet’ in modern Western culture, claims that the hetero/homobinary was often intertwined with the knowledge/ignorance binary, so that secrecy,opacity and deceitfulness were associated with homosexuality.12 Suchassociations, it seems, circulated well in the racialised colonial context, too.

It was not uncommon for the sexualisation of the Third World to resort tovarious forms of misogyny (as evidenced by the Edward Long quote above).Anne McClintock coins the term ‘porno-tropics’ to describe how colonised landswere labelled ‘virgin territories’ to rationalise their take-over (or their‘penetration’ or ‘rape’), while at the same time representing their inhabitants,and especially native women, as sexually promiscuous and voracious.13 Nativemen, for their part, if they were not being directly portrayed as ‘sodomites’,were often symbolically castrated by being labelled ‘effeminate’.14 MrinaliniSinha shows, in this regard, how the stereotype of the effeminate Bengali helpedsecure the British self-image of masculinity and justify the continued Britishpresence in India in the late 19th-century, for example by helping rebuff(emasculate?) Indian demands for greater access to power.15

The theme of sexual perversity and the myth of the ‘erotic East’ are repeated ina plethora of writings about the Orient by European adventurers, travellers,geographers, anthropologists and administrators.16 Often it is Arab and Muslimcultures that are depicted as sexually promiscuous, with much of the writingpresenting them as tolerating and even propagating such ‘aberrant’ practices assodomy.17 Of particular note is the work of late 19th-century adventurer-explorer Richard Burton, who hypothesised that there is a ‘Sotadic Zone’stretching from Southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa to Asia-Pacific and

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the Southern ‘New World’, where sexual perversion is endemic thanks to the warmclimate. He claimed that this Sotadic Zone was rife with ‘debaucherie’ and ‘eroticperversion’, and that pederasty (referred to as ‘Le Vice contre nature’) waspractised alongside bestiality, cannibalism, infanticide and prostitution.18

Of course, representations such as Burton’s amounted not simply to naiveorientalist exoticism; as suggested above, homophobia, misogyny and racismserved as important technologies to support and advance colonial power. In thisconnection Anne Stoler talks about racialised sexual hierarchies established inthe Dutch Indies between colonialists and natives – how strict laws were con-structed to distinguish all-white from mixed couples, and ‘pure breeds’ from theprogeny of mixed marriages or cohabitation.19 According to Richard Philips,such sexual control was also present in the British Empire during the Victorianperiod, with carefully thought-out rules regulating sexual relationships amongand between Britishers and locals. These covered everything from marriage,cohabitation and consensual sex to prostitution, ‘buggery’ and sexual diseases,all aimed at ensuring ‘moral’ and social order.20 In a similar vein Glen Elderargues in the South African context that colonial domination reflected pervasiveanxieties about homosexual relations among and between Whites and Blacks.Such anxieties were visible, for example, in the geographic ordering of apart-heid, with clearly demarcated and strictly enforced spatial and discursive divi-sions (eg between Black miners’ dormitories and White family residentialestates, or between the ethnicised Bantustans or Black township ghettos and theWhite inner city neighbourhoods).21

The sexualisation and queering of the Third World thus helped discursivelyconstruct the Third World. This is what Edward Said famously called Orien-talism. On the one hand, as Said points out, such a construction had ‘less to dowith the Orient than it [did] with “our” [Western] world’.22 To be sure, thecolonisers were acting out their own European homophobic (and other) preju-dices and representations in the colonies. The Third World served, in this sense,as a screen onto which Western colonial sexual fantasies, desires and anxietieswere being projected or transferred.23 But, on the other hand, these were notneutral prejudices and representations; they had material and institutional conse-quences. Racist homophobia resulted in physical violence against the colo-nised,24 while colonial sexual control, as we saw above, yielded enforceablelaws, social hierarchies and geographic demarcations. The Third World was thusproduced as queer: not in the sense of the West imposing homosexuality on thecolonies (quite the opposite), but in the Saidian sense of Orientalism as the‘enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to man-age – and even produce – the Orient’.25 Regardless of whether the Third Worldactually was ‘queer’, it was represented, regulated and disciplined as such.

Given these material and institutional impacts, it is little wonder that thecolonial queering of the Third World has had enduring legacies. This is evidentperhaps no more so than in the field of international development. For example,the very notion of development stages ‘traditional’ societies as pathological, thatis, deviating from what is taken as the natural progression towards (Western)capitalist modernity. What is remarkable about the ‘trad/mod’ binary that under-girds this discourse is how queer the Third World is made out to be – unnatural,abnormal, effete, passive (read: effeminate), strange, backward, underdeveloped,


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threatening. This is particularly true in relation to economic performance, assess-ments of which tend to be nothing less than emasculating: growth is invariablyshown to be limping, if not falling short, the result of incompetence, corruptionand weak entrepreneurialism, which render the typical Third World economyincapable of competing against aggressive, win-or-die global business. The solu-tion to such feebleness and failure is usually structural adjustment and debtrelief, which many countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, have beencoerced into accepting. These frequently entail severe ‘austerity’ measures (fiscal‘discipline’, budget slashing, privatisation, market liberalisation) and a heavydose of browbeating (the need for economic ‘correctness’ and sound policy,‘good’ governance, and greater transparency and anti-corruption rules). Througha queer lens this all looks like an exercise in economic straight-ening, aimed atdisciplining, punishing and exorcising the Third-World-as-queer.

The recent global security discourse continues in this vein. As Mark Duffieldcontends, this discourse constructs the ‘borderlands’ (ie the Third World) as animagined geographic space of instability, excess and social breakdown, thus pos-ing a threat to the West.26 The Third World is typically seen as violent andunpredictable, or at least a potential danger; it is the source of many of the prob-lems seen to plague global security, including drug trafficking, terrorism, rapidpopulation growth, refugee flows, weak, corrupt or rogue states and, morerecently, infectious disease.

To be sure, the global spread of infectious diseases has been used to aid andabet, if not the queering of the Third World, certainly its continued sexualisa-tion, while also buttressing the global security discourse. With regard to theHIV/AIDS pandemic, Black African men and women, in particular, have tendedto be portrayed as dangerous and irresponsible in their sexual behaviour, withthe colonial stereotype of the sexually voracious African commonly reproducedin Western donor and international health agency policy documents as the mainexplanation for the spread of AIDS.27 Other infectious diseases (SARS, bird flu,swine flu, Ebola), while not sexually transmitted, have nonetheless retained aracialised sexual dimension in media, development and security discourses:28

they are seen as originating in ‘overpopulated’ places (eg China, Mexico, WestAfrica), where people apparently reproduce too much and live in close proxim-ity both to billions of animals (poultry, swine, bats and other wild animals) andto one another, which propagates the exchange of bodily fluids and disease.Reminiscent of colonial technologies of power, this pitting of ‘normal’ against‘abnormal’ populations – healthy vs unhealthy, peopled vs overpopulated/teem-ing, sexually conventional vs licentious/queer, clean vs infected, lascivious,beastly – helps construct and justify the policies that we have now come toassociate with global security: the profiling, detention, deportation, quarantiningor indeed elimination of threatening groups.

It is also important to note the West’s newfound championing of gay rightsglobally, in the wake of queer liberalism. Colonial homophobia towards theThird World is increasingly being replaced by a high-mindedness which nowsees the West judging Third World (and Eastern European) states as eitherhomo-friendly or homophobic, frequently hectoring them when they fail to pro-tect LGBTI rights, to the point of withholding aid (as was the case recently withthe US aid programme in Uganda, for example). Yet, despite appearances, this

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latest Western stand is also a form of queering: the colonial manoeuvre maywell have hinged on homophobia, which the West now conveniently condemns;but the current Western strategy nonetheless pivots on a manipulative ‘homo-righteousness’, as it were. Both are equally orientalist technologies of poweraimed at estranging the Third World, belittling it, putting it in its place.

‘Unqueering’ the Third WorldWhile there has been continuity from colonial to contemporary times in theWestern representation of the Third-World-as-queer, there have also been movesin the opposite direction on the part of postcolonial Third World countries –attempts at ‘unqueering’ themselves, at purging the queer from their midst. Insome measure this is a reaction to the humiliation and inferiority wrought by(neo)colonialism and Orientalism: the desire to be equal to one’s (former) mas-ter, perhaps even to imitate him; and hence the desire not to be different orqueer. Maureen Sioh takes a psychoanalytic view of this phenomenon, showinghow the anxieties of humiliation and the desire for dignity are played out inEast Asian economies. For her these countries’ striving for economic growth isequally a straining to command the same degree of respect globally as does theWest.29

But to a great measure such unqueering is specifically geared towardspurging the homosexual. A sure sign of this is the continued criminalisation ofhomosexuality in much of the Third World (most of the Middle East, NorthAfrica, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and parts of Latin America and EastAsia). Several countries (eg Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, parts ofNigeria and Sudan) even make same-sex relationships punishable by death. Oflate it has been sub-Saharan Africa that has seen particularly virulent forms ofhomophobia, in the wake of Uganda’s ‘Kill the Gays’ bill, Nigeria’s ‘Jail theGays’ law, Gambia’s ‘Aggravated Homosexuality’ legislation and RobertMugabe’s repeated statements about homosexuals as offending ‘the law of nat-ure and the morals and religious beliefs espoused by our society’.30 SeveralAfrican leaders, including Mugabe, have characterised homosexuality as‘un-African’, denouncing it as a dangerous and perverted Western import.31 Andthis in spite of numerous findings of same-sex practices across Africa beforecolonial rule.32

These legal prohibitions and homophobic outbursts appear to have severalcauses. First, we should recall that many of the sodomy laws criminalisinghomosexuality are carry-overs from British, Portuguese and French colonialrule.33 Most often these laws have made sexual practices that were previouslysocially acceptable into abnormal ones, thus creating an enabling environmentfor intolerance against queers. Second, homophobia is often used by ThirdWorld leaders for political purposes, for example to whip up public sentiment asa diversion from important socioeconomic problems. Mugabe leaps to mindhere, given that his repeated homophobic (and anti-West) rants have run along-side his country’s ongoing political and social instabilities. Finally, right-wingUS evangelical and pentecostal proselytising, particularly in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa, has played an important part in promoting assaults againsthomosexuality (and abortion). The prominent role of US religious groups in


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fanning homophobia in Uganda in recent years is now well acknowledged, butthere is also growing evidence of these groups lobbying for conservative poli-cies and laws in such countries as Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Kenya.34

Over the years this has all undoubtedly contributed to homophobic violenceand prejudice. LGBTI people have been the victims of beatings, detention, tor-ture, murder and death across the Third World. They have been denied access tohealth care or other social services and benefits.35 And they have often sufferedin silence for fear of being ‘outed’ or reported to the authorities. In relation topresent-day Uganda, for example, Sylvia Tamale underscores how the state’s‘regime of compulsory heterosexuality’ creates a climate of fear among LGBTIpeople and among women, and severely limits public discourse on such keyissues as marriage, sex and gender.36

Of course, this process of unqueering does not apply uniformly across theThird World. There are several exceptions worth noting of countries that haveembraced a queer liberalism: there are constitutional protections for LGBTI peo-ple in South Africa, Fiji and Ecuador, and same-sex marriage/union recognitionin Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador and some states in Mexico. Yet, whilethere is no doubt that these places are relatively more progressive on queerissues, there remain nonetheless, in these as in other parts of the Third World,some deep-seated homophobic prejudices and practices (as is the case in manyparts of the West as well). A large part of the reason has to do with continuingforms of hetero-normativity embedded in development processes.

Indeed, for the most part development assumes heterosexuality. Heterosexualmarriage is taken as the basis of the family unit and the building block of socialreproduction. Yet this has often meant the de facto legitimation of patriarchaland capitalist relations of power: as head of the household, the husband andfather wields authority not only over all family members (especially women) butalso over the labour of each member. A gendered division of labour ensues:men typically work outside the home for a wage, while women engage inunpaid household labour (food preparation, child rearing, cleaning); if the latterdo work outside, they are remunerated less than men. Most often women carrya double load (homework and professional work); to that extent they are ensur-ing the health, well-being and labour supply of both family and workforce.37

So when development programming assumes heterosexuality or takes the‘household’ for granted, as it customarily does, it is validating and reinforcingthese hetero-patriarchal capitalist relationships. As Susie Jolly points out, landreform programmes, anti-poverty strategies and rural planning alike, becausethey treat the nuclear family and male head-of-household as the norm, end upnot only favouring men over women but also result in ‘more pressure on peopleto...stay within heterosexual family set-ups’.38

The consequences for queer people are numerous and generally dire. Thesocial (ie hetero-patriarchal and capitalist) pressures to marry, along with thesocioeconomic benefits of marriage (dowries, inheritance, the prospect ofincreased social status and standard of living) mean that gay and lesbian peopleare inclined to get and stay married. Such compulsory heterosexuality discour-ages women, in particular, from leaving unhappy, abusive or violent marriages.Lesbians (wives, mothers, daughters) frequently suffer in silence, with suiciderates among their ranks, and the ranks of LGBTI people more generally, tending

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to be high.39 Should queers dare to ‘come out’, they usually suffer severe socialinjunctions, including family- or community-sanctioned rape.40 The loss offamily, in turn, means the loss of social capital (eg family, kinship and/or castenetworks), which threatens their very livelihoods and survival. The result issocioeconomic marginalisation, with many LGBTI people being forced intoeither the informal sector or prostitution and the global sex trade.41

Of late, usually at the behest of international or Western aid agencies, therehave been a few attempts to target state programmes towards ‘disadvantaged’groups. But these, too, have not escaped hetero-normative biases.42 Gender pro-gramming, for example, has generally taken straight women as the norm, thusinvisibilising queer or non-traditional heterosexual women.43 The same appearsto be true, at least to a degree, of HIV/AIDS programming, which has tended toassume the disease is transmitted only heterosexually, thus neglecting gaymen.44 Interventions specifically directed towards LGBTI communities are fewand far between and most often not benign. In his assessment of programmingfor ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM), for example, Andil Gosine concludesthat the representations of gay men in such programming tend to mirror those ofthe colonial era: the queer is seen as ‘uncivilized, unwieldy, threatening andrequiring management to save him from himself, as well as the world...In otherwords, health care interventions directed at MSM are justified toward protectionand preservation of the heterosexual nation.’45

The unqueering of the Third World manifests itself, therefore, through homo-phobic laws, policies and prejudices that repress and closet homosexuals; andthrough hetero-normative structures that normalise sexual behaviour and per-petuate gender and capitalist hierarchies. As for development programming, tothe large extent that it incorporates and reflects these underlying structures andprejudices, it can often contribute to the marginalisation of queers, sometimeseven when it intends to help them.

The queer Third WorldHow, then, to interpret the paradoxical attempts by the West to queer the ThirdWorld and by the Third World to ‘unqueer’ itself? While seemingly contradic-tory, I want to suggest that both moves are two sides of the same coin. That is,both result from the same orientalist hetero-normative discourse founded on thenormal/abnormal or the straight/queer binary. As the historically dominant powerthe West is here casting itself in a positive light by othering the Third World; asthe historically subordinate power the Third World is compensating for itsothering and humiliation by shedding and purging its abnormality/queerness.The Third World is thus buying into and reproducing (symbolically and materi-ally) its oppressor’s binary structure of signification. It may well characterisehomosexuality as a Western ‘import’, yet such characterisation is nothing but acontinuation of the very colonial technologies of power (homophobia, racism,sexism) that it has purportedly fought against. It may well posture as anti-West,yet such posturing is belied, for the most part, by its de facto imitation of theWest – its embrace of Westernisation and neoliberal growth strategies, forexample.


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It is the fact that both the West and the Third World are shot through withthe same forces of global capitalism, moreover, that helps explain why each islocked into, and reproduces, the same hetero-normative discourse. Both areequally beholden to a socioeconomic system that thrives, as we have seen, on agendered division of labour and the marginalisation of queers. Thus, even therecent advent of queer liberalism in (most of) the West and (parts of) ThirdWorld can only ensure the tolerant incorporation of LGBTI rights into liberalcapitalism, leaving mostly untouched the deeper hierarchic and hetero-patriarchalstructures.

The irony is that, strive as it may to be equal to the West, the Third Worldwill never be equal to the task. This is because the orientalist hetero-normativediscourse it consents to already sets it up as a failure, ensuring that it can neverbe fully ‘developed’ – an ‘emerging economy’ perhaps, but never one that hassurfaced.

So how might one avert reproducing this orientalist hetero-normativediscourse? Is queer/Third World liberation possible without acquiescing to(neo)colonial and homophobic technologies of power? I would like to draw onthe work of queer theorist Lee Edelman to offer some tentative answers.46

Rather than countering the homophobic stereotypes and practices that resultfrom hetero-normative discourses, Edelman argues for embracing, not the stereo-types and practices themselves, but the social antagonisms to which they point(eg the impossibility of the ‘normal’). He thus advocates a relentless politics ofnegativity as a way of short-circuiting hetero-normativity.

Edelman is drawing on Jacques Lacan here. For Lacan reality is precarious,always fractured by gaps and contradictions, which he refers to as the ‘Real’.47

This Lacanian Real is the limit – the horizon of negativity – of any signifying/discursive system; it punctures meaning and identity, making them forever lack-ing and unstable. And it is this emphasis on the instability of identity that alignsLacanian psychoanalysis with queer theory, prompting Tim Dean to state:‘Lacan makes psychoanalysis look rather queer’.48 Both Lacan and queer theory(of the type espoused by Edelman) share the radical questioning of socialnorms. They dispute the very idea of the ‘normal’, upon which heterosexualityis founded. For example, according to Lacan, there is nothing natural or normalabout sex (hence his famous one-liner, ‘There is no sexual relation’49). This isbecause people connect not through some primordial attraction but through lan-guage, which for Lacan is always incomplete, imprecise, opaque. Thus, far frombeing tied to biology or the identity or sexual orientation of the other, desire istied to language (in fact, desire is, for Lacan, an effect of language; that is, theresult of the gaps/Real in language50). And, by affirming a stable identity andnotions of the natural and the normal, hetero-normativity conceals or disavowssuch instability.

Like Lacan, Edelman sees negativity as constitutive of the social.51 Heapproaches queerness as an embodiment of such negativity, yielding to a relent-less disruption of social norms: queerness ‘can never define an identity; it canonly ever disturb one’, he declares.52 As highlighted earlier, his book, NoFuture, is a critique of ‘reproductive futurism’; it exposes hetero-normativity’snostalgic treatment of childhood innocence and promise for what it is – astrategy to buttress the future, that is, to maintain and further biological, social

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and capitalist reproduction. To the extent that queerness is non-reproductive,then, it represents the failure of hetero-normativity. Indeed, it threatens and frac-tures the social and in that sense – to echo Lacan – tends towards a politics ofthe Real.53

Edelman coins the term ‘sinthomosexual’ to describe the main protagonist ofsuch a politics, a figure who, while created by reproductive futurism,transgresses and dislocates it.54 What drives the sinthomosexual, according toEdelman, is jouissance – a Lacanian concept meaning intense and transgressivepleasure. His idea here is to put queer non-reproductive eros, so often dispar-aged by straight society as sterile and excessive,55 to use for political purposes– to make the excessive transgressive, as it were.56 The sinthomosexual thus rel-ishes the thrill derived from a politics of the Real: challenging authority, defyingpatriarchy or undoing homophobia and hetero-normativity is (or can be) joyful,if not ecstatic.57 Consequently it is this paradoxical pleasure – a jouissance thatdelights in the pain or danger of the radical political act – that motivates,nourishes and sustains a queer politics of the Real.

What are the implications of all of this for the Third World, given the chal-lenge of trying to negotiate orientalist hetero-normative discourse without repro-ducing its binary structure? Clearly the idea is not to imitate the West since, aswe have seen, that merely normalises both the West’s domination and the ThirdWorld’s subordination. Nor should one simply oppose the hegemon by criticis-ing homophobia and orientalism or valorising a non-Western nativist or national-ist authenticity (eg ‘homosexuality is “un-African”’), since these, too, are anacceptance of, and entrapment within, the given binary logic. At most, and aswe have seen, the latter yields to a tolerance of queers (ie a queer liberalism) ora virulent and homophobic parochialism without addressing underlying ques-tions of hetero-normativity or neo-colonialism. The idea, rather, is for the ThirdWorld to embrace its queerness-as-negativity. Indeed, to the extent that it repre-sents (or has been made to represent) the failure of global modernity, the ThirdWorld threatens and fractures globalisation. Thus, by firmly inhabiting this posi-tion of structural negativity, it can help destabilise normalising practices, be theyneo-colonial, orientalist, hetero-normative, patriarchal or racist. By revisiting itspolitical roots in non-alignment, it can attempt to trouble the increasing natural-isation of global neoliberal capitalism. And by engaging in a relentless queerpolitics of the Real, it can seek to mess up fixed binaries, identities orhierarchies, whether political, gendered or sexual.

This would mean, for example, cultivating queer affect as a political strategy:rather than directly criticising homophobic, misogynist or orientalist stereotypes,showing a certain fatigue, indifference or boredom towards them; rather thantaking the hegemon seriously, responding with incredulity, disorderliness orawkwardness; and rather than conforming to the master’s rules, wilfully forget-ting or ignoring them, improvising with them, or over-identifying with them (ietaking them seriously to the point of absurdity). Using stereotypical queer affectin this way – whim, insincerity, camp, nonsense, over-the-top emotion, unre-generate sexuality, silliness, goofiness58 – interrupts and stupefies hegemonicpower by declining to address it directly, thereby delegitimising it. In this regardJudith/Jack Halberstam suggests the deployment of more explicitly negative


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queer political emotions – from rage, anger, mania and spite to incivility, dykeanger, anticolonial despair and punk pugilism. He59 states:

we must be willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange toembrace a truly political negativity, one that promises, this time, to fail, to make amess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bashback, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock, and annihilate, and toabandon the neat, clever, [and] chiasmatic.60

Queer affect can thus help produce an uncivil politics that no state or socio-political regime can easily discipline or regulate.

The effectiveness of any queer Third World politics will hinge crucially onits ability to disrupt (hetero-normative) capitalism. This will involve rethinkingand reworking institutions as much as cultures: reordering labour relations andthe sexual/gender division of labour; moving away from legal regimes that privi-lege private and civil/political rights towards ones that also favour collective andsocioeconomic rights (eg land rights, housing rights, indigenous rights, genderand queer rights); undoing capitalist discourses centred on wealth accumulation,entrepreneurialism, market competition and patriarchal/masculinist codes; and soon. But it will also involve creating spaces for non-conforming and non-capital-ist practices. In this regard, echoing queer theorist Eve Sedgwick, J. K. Gibson-Graham ask: ‘What if we were to depict social existence at loose ends withitself...What if we were to “queer” capitalist hegemony and break apart some ofits consolidating associations?’61 They have in mind ‘post-capitalist’ socialeconomies such as cooperatives (eg the Mondragon Basque Cooperative), localeconomic trading systems and remittance-based community projects (eg in thePhilippines),62 but we could add worker self-management enterprises, socialhousing, participatory budgeting and community forestry. In the Third Worldcontext the recuperation and reinvention of highly diverse subjugated, buried orsubaltern socioeconomic institutions, ranging from handicraft ateliers and smallanimal husbandry to contemporary indigenous medicinal and health clinics andsmall-scale textile workshops, will also be pertinent and important.

Given its non-conformist bent, a queer Third World politics of the type I amgesturing towards would appear to cater more to non-state than state actors (thestate being a normalising set of institutions par excellence). Yet, given the state’scontinuing (albeit changing) significance in both domestic and global politics,queering the state – pressuring it to institute non-capitalist practices such asthose described above, for example – will be vital. In this regard Bolivia’s cur-rent Morales regime appears to be one of the queerest globally: it has purpose-fully remained non-aligned to either the (Western) neoliberal democratic model(adopted by most of the contemporary world) or the authoritarian capitalistmodel (adopted by the likes of China, Russia, Singapore, etc). Instead, pursuinga unique communitarian Andean model of ‘living well’, it is one of the veryfew that has put the country’s subalterns first (indigenous groups and thesocioeconomically most poor and marginalised), while confronting domestic andinternational economic elites and defying the free market proposals of the IMFand World Bank. While certainly not perfect,63 it better illustrates how tosocioeconomically restructure (including how to effectively regulate powerful

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mining multinationals) than do the vast majority of Third World states commit-ted to non-alignment and the New International Economic Order.64

Finally, we must ask what a queer Third World politics means for ThirdWorld queers. Although it is, of course, a politics that defies normalising andhetero-normative practices and hence defends sexual minority and gender rightswrit large, its structural negativity also implies that LGBTI activism settle, noton identity issues (eg queer liberalism), but on the intersection of queer politicswith other key socioeconomic problems. This is illustrated by the differencebetween, say, a gay rights activist and a queer socialist revolutionary, or a pro-gay marriage LGBTI association and LGBTI people fighting for subaltern landrights. So, when Third World HIV/AIDS politics concerns itself not just withdiscovering new and more effective retroviral drugs – thereby narrowly focusingon science and funding issues – but with ensuring cheaper and equal access tothose drugs for all – thereby bringing the state and multinational pharmaceuti-cals to account – we have a queer Third World politics truer to its name. Enget al point, in a similar vein, to the emergence of global queer diasporas that areincreasingly denaturalising such institutions as home, nation, marriage and citi-zenship on the basis, not of origin, ethnicity or ‘race’, but of destination, sexual-ity and sociopolitical commitment.65 It is such nonconforming, intersectionaland politically messy engagements that yield a queer Third World politics of theReal.

ConclusionI have argued that the Third World’s attempts at ‘unqueering’ itself are a knee-jerk response to the West’s attempts at queering it, thus reproducing the West’sbinary structure of signification. Instead of allowing it to be non-aligned, suchunqueering causes the Third World, on the contrary, to continue to perpetuateorientalism and capitalist hetero-normativity, thereby confirming the West as the‘best’ and the Third Word as too queer to ever quite reach the mark. As aconsequence, rather than suppress or disavow its queerness, I have suggestedthe Third World embrace it. By occupying its (de facto constructed) position ofqueerness-as-structural negativity, the Third World can dismantle normalisingpractices – including orientalism, homophobia and capitalist hetero-normativity– while at the same time searching for counter-hegemonic and non-capitalistalternatives.

But of course none of this is easily done. Many difficult obstacles lie in theway, with no guarantees of reaching one’s goals. A radical and deviant politicsalways risks resistance, compromise and co-optation as a result of, say, eliteopposition, state repression or neoliberal commodification (think of how Che,Gandhi and feminism have been commoditised of late). And, against these odds,even were a queer counter-hegemony to be achieved, there is always the risk ofit becoming a new normativity. Contemporary LGBTI politics are a case inpoint: not only is there nothing intrinsic to LGBTI groups that predisposes themto a radical politics but, as mentioned above, Third World queer liberalism hasdone little to move beyond civil rights and same-sex marriage recognition, thelatter tending to reinforce rather than dismantle hetero-normativity. Moreover,where Third World LGBTI rights have been won, global capital has not


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hesitated to use this cultural–political shift as an opportunity for niche marketingand consumerism, thus seducing LGBTI communities and blunting their politicalresistance.

But then one must ask: what are the conditions of possibility of a queerThird World politics? Is it not pie-in-the sky to suggest that such a radicalalternative can be practised when so much stands in its way? I want to return tothe question of jouissance, highlighted earlier, to provide (the beginnings of) ananswer: the great challenge for the Third World Left will be not merely to comeup with a queer alternative but to ensure it is a seductive one – one that peoplewill enjoy. It is not enough to draw people in at the level of the intellect; they/we must also be seduced at the level of the passions. And a Left queer alterna-tive will need to be at least as enjoyable as that put forward by hetero-normativeneoliberal capitalism – as pleasurable as the power that male patriarchs derivefrom patriarchy, entrepreneurs from profit making or consumers from shopping.It is jouissance, then, that can create the conditions of possibility of a dissidentqueer alternative, one from which citizens and queer revolutionaries alike aremoved and enlivened – why not? – by the pain and peril of radical political actsor the transgressive pleasures of working towards more just, but alwayscontested, societies.

AcknowledgementsMany thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments. I am very grateful to Mary Hawkesworthand Andil Gosine for their feedback. And my infinite thanks to Kent, as always.

Notes on contributorIlan Kapoor is Professor of critical development studies at the Faculty of Environ-mental Studies, York University, Toronto. He is the author of Celebrity Humani-tarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity (2013) and The Postcolonial Politics ofDevelopment (2008). He is currently writing a book on psychoanalysis anddevelopment, and recently edited a subtheme issue of Third World Quarterly onthis topic. His teaching and research focus on postcolonial theory and politics, par-ticipatory development and democracy, and psychoanalytic Marxism.

Notes1. ‘Third World’ denotes for me, then, both the promise of non-alignment (as articulated in Bandung) and

its betrayal, as evidenced by the alignment of most postcolonial Third World states with Westernisedneoliberal capitalism.

2. Foucault, The History of Sexuality.3. Ibid., 43.4. Edelman, No Future, 2.5. Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization. In contrast, see Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, who

argues that women and queers played a positive role in the shaping of modern Iranian politics andculture.

6. Warner, The Trouble with Normal; Hennessy, “Queer Theory, Left Politics”; Edelman, No Future; andHalberstam, The Queer Art of Failure.

7. See, for example, McClintock, Imperial Leather; Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; and Philips,Sex, Politics and Empire.

8. Jara and Spadaccini, quoted in Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean, 30.9. Jordan, “First Impressions,” 44.10. Edward Long, quoted in Young, Colonial Desire, 151. See also Gosine, “Monster, Womb, MSM.”

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11. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 221; Gosine, “‘Race’, Culture,” 32; and Gosine, “Monster, Womb,MSM,” 27.

12. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 4–5, 73.13. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 21ff.14. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 82, points out the often contradictory nature of colonial stereo-

typing. For example, the colonised are characterised as both ‘effeminate’ sodomites and hyper-masculinerapists threatening white women. Taken separately, each construction is used to justify colonial authorityas and where needed to estrange the Third World Other. Yet, grouped together, according to Bhabha,they underline the ambivalent and unstable bases upon which such authority rests. The same could besaid today of international development: the Third World is stereotyped as weak and effeminate when itcomes to economic management but as hyper-sexed and macho when it comes to questions of ‘overpop-ulation’. Despite the contradiction, each construction queers the Third World, helping to justify FirstWorld superiority and power.

15. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.16. Kabbani, Imperial Fictions, 26, 66.17. Ibid., 65. See also Zavala, “Representing the Colonial Subject,” 330.18. Burton, “Terminal Essay,” 206–207, 209, 222, 240. See also Kabbani, Imperial Fictions, 66.19. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire.20. Philips, Sex, Politics and Empire, 5.21. Elder, “Of Moffies”; and Elder, “The South African Body Politic.”22. Said, Orientalism, 12.23. See Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development, 64–66; and Nyongo’o, “Queer Africa,” 53.24. See Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa?, 58.25. Said, Orientalism, 3.26. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War, ix, 24. See also Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, on the

deployment of ‘homo-nationalism’ to distinguish Western liberal democracies from racialised andsexualised terrorists.

27. Gosine, “‘Race’, Culture,” 32; and Wilson, Race, Racism and Development, 97ff.28. See, for example, Lavin and Russill, “The Ideology of the Epidemic.”29. Sioh, “Manicheism Delirium.”30. “Furious Mugabe.”31. See Rukweza, “Is Homosexuality really ‘UnAfrican’?”32. Same-sex practices have been shown to have occurred across Africa before colonial rule, for example

among the Nuba in Sudan, where men dressed and lived as women; among the Azande in NorthernCongo, where warriors habitually married boys, who functioned as temporary wives; in the pastoralcommunities of Madagascar and Ethiopia, where transvestism was (and is) not uncommon; and amongthe Khoikhoi in South Africa, where lesbianism was practiced in polygamous households. See Nadel,The Nuba; Evans-Pritchard, “Sexual Inversion”; Murray and Roscoe, Boy-wives; and Epprecht, Hetero-sexual Africa?

33. See Stychin and Herman, Sexuality in the Legal Arena; and Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing.34. See, for example, Kaoma, How the US Christian Right; and Williams, God Loves Uganda.35. See Weiss and Bosia, Global Homophobia.36. Tamale, Homosexuality Perspectives, 176.37. Hennessy, “Queer Theory,” 102.38. Jolly, “Why is Development Work so Straight?,” 24; and Jolly, “‘Queering’ Development,” 86.39. See Weiss and Bosia, Global Homophobia. Note that in the Middle East low levels of participation by

women in the labour force have meant lesbian invisibility. See Lind and Share, “Queering Develop-ment”; Khayatt, “The Place of Desire”; and Drucker, “Changing Families,” 827.

40. Jolly, “‘Queering’ Development,” 80–81.41. Drucker “Changing Families,” 827; Jolly, “Why is Development Work so Straight?,” 21–22; and Altman,

“The Emergence.”42. In the context of international and Western donor agencies, Robert Mizzi coins the term ‘heteroprofes-

sionalism’ to describe homophobic and heterosexist behaviours in the workplace that screen out homo-sexuality and privilege heterosexuality. See Mizzi, “‘There aren’t any Gays Here’.”

43. Jolly, “Why is Development Work so Straight?,” 26.44. See Gosine, “Monster, Womb, MSM.”45. Ibid., 30. There is also the risk of ‘homo-normativity’ in development programming geared towards

LGBTI people, especially by Western donors. That is, taking the white, Western gay man as the stan-dard: assuming, for instance, that gay rights protection is a key objective when, in the development con-text, better access to health services or retroviral drugs might be much more significant. See Lind,Development, Sexual Rights.

46. Edelman, No Future. Note that I have dealt with questions of the applicability of psychoanalysis to theThird World elsewhere (including feminist and postcolonial criticisms of psychoanalysis, and the univer-salisability of the Lacanian viewpoint). See Kapoor, “Psychoanalysis and Development,” 1135–1138.

47. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XI, 53.


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48. Dean, “Lacan and Queer Theory,” 238.49. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XVII, 134.50. See Kapoor, “Psychoanalysis and Development,” 1122.51. Along with Leo Bersani and Judith Halberstam, Edelman is often considered a proponent of the

‘anti-social’ thesis in queer theory, that is, an exponent of queer political negativity, unbelonging andsocial alienation. See Bersani, Homos; and Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure.

52. Edelman, No Future, 17.53. Ibid., 5, 9.54. Ibid., 38, 47. Edelman is here drawing on the Lacanian concept of the sinthome, which is the particular

and unique form that jouissance (intense and transgressive pleasure) can take in every subject.55. The issue of ‘sterility’ applies contradictorily in the Third World context. Just as Edelman argues is the

case in the West, LGBTI people in the Third World will tend to be characterised as ‘sterile’ because theythreaten reproductive capitalism. But in Western orientalist discourse the Third-World-as-queer will oftenbe depicted as the far opposite of sterile – as not just reproductive, but hyper-reproductive and ‘over-populated’, to the point of threatening global sustainability. As underlined in note 14 above, while con-tradictory, each construction is a way of exercising and justifying domination of an Other (whetherLGBTI people or the Third-World-as-queer) by estranging it.

56. Edelman is, in fact, very hostile to politics, at least of the mainstream kind – one that is always lookingtowards a future good (‘reproductive futurism’). Instead, he identifies with a queer politics of the Real/the death drive, oriented towards transgression and rupture.

57. Edelman, No Future, 85.58. See Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 109–110. See also Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, which

shows how sexual trauma and queer affect can catalyse political activism and communities.59. Judith Halberstam tends to employ the masculine pronoun to refer to himself and sometimes goes by the

name ‘Jack’.60. Halberstam, “The Politics of Negativity,” 824. See also Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 110. Here,

Halberstam is being critical of Edelman. He criticises No Future for relying on examples mainly from‘white gay male culture’ (Edelman illustrates sinthomosexuality by drawing on Charles Dickens’Ebenezer Scrooge, George Eliot’s Silas Marner, Leonard in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, and thebirds in Hitchcock’s The Birds). While I agree to some extent with this criticism, and draw on Halber-stam (and Edelman) on the use of queer affect for political purposes, I tend not to endorse Halberstam’smain argument in The Queer Art of Failure. Indeed, in championing failure as a queer ‘art’, Halberstamends up essentialising queerness-as-failure: rather than averting and dismantling the success/failure binarypromoted by capitalist hetero-normativity, Halberstam reproduces it by seeing failure as success (andcharacterising failure as some kind of authentic queer political art). It seems to me that, by living up to‘failure’, the queer (or in our case the Third World) is buying into the capitalist logic of success ratherthan disrupting it. The challenge, to follow Edelman, is not to oppose the discourse of success byvalorising its opposite (ie failure as essence), but to see failure as structural negativity (ie as the Real,which disrupts every attempt at success, including failure-as-success).

61. Gibson-Graham, “Queer(y)ing Capitalism,” 81, 93. See also Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism,138; and Oswin, “The End of Queer.”

62. Gibson-Graham, “Queer(y)ing Capitalism”; and Gibson-Graham, A Post-capitalist Politics.63. A weak judiciary (jeopardising the country’s democratic system), budding state authoritarian tendencies

and a growing cult of personality centred on Morales are some of the main criticisms directed againstthe current Bolivian state. Of course, institutionalised hetero-normativity (and homophobia) continues toremain a major challenge with this state, as with all states. See Fontana, “On the Perils.”

64. The Bolivian example also suggests that queer states are more likely to emerge in the Third World thanthe West, given the latter’s mostly uncritical championing of neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracyover the past three decades, and at least pockets of resistance to these throughout the Third World duringthe same period (eg Chavez’s Venezuela, Castro’s Cuba, Allende’s Chile, Kerala’s democratic commu-nism, etc).

65. Eng et al., “Introduction,” 7–10.

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