Rahul Rao, Out of time: the queer politics of postcoloniality

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the discursive prism of development that historically marked India and Southern Africa in scholarship across disciplines has increasingly been subsumed within the neo-developmentalist prism of neoliberalism. This has been accompanied by attendant visions of places like India and Uganda as markets that could rival those of other national formations in Asia and in the West. The visibility and legibility of queer and transgender social movements in the Global South over this period has been read through the lens of neoliberalism within analyses that are keen to mark queer and trans-visibility signs of global capitalism’s success. If the conjoined prism of neoliberalism and liberal LGBTQIAþmovements in the Global South has produced a kind of circumscribed legibility for non-heteronormative lives, the idea that neoliberalism has somehow facilitated either queer and trans legibility or liberation in nonWestern worlds is equally contested and complicated across a host of disciplinary engagements, including queer theory, comparative literature, literary studies, history, sociology, anthropology, and in International Relations, as in Rahul Rao’s ethnographically informed work, Out of Time. Celebratory critiques of the era of neoliberalism and rising queer and transgender visibility in the Global South are often framed by an implicit, or explicit, argument that the expansion of privatisation and marketisation leads to greater individual freedoms for all (for example, see Frank, Boutcher, and Camp 2009). While critiques of neoliberalism have been essential in work that aims to mitigate the ‘illiberalism’ of neo-populist resistance to queer and transgender rights in certain regional contexts (e.g. Binnie 2014), mapping neoliberalism onto queer and transgender progress—usually rendered the expansion of juridical rights and recognition for LGBTQ-identified individuals—has come under scrutiny both for its reproduction of the immanence of the telos of progress to humanism, (Eng 2010) and for its conflation of freedom with a constrained version of juridical legibility. These critiques have been rendered via critiques of racialised hierarchies of human development and enlightenment thought. Rao builds on these critiques with a view towards meaningfully assessing the status of queer sexuality politics to the telos of development within nationalist imaginaries, where the meaning of sexual ‘progress’ within ‘national progress’ is highly debated. The basis for a re-examination of this chrononormativity in narratives of queer progress is deployed via Rao’s rich ethnographic engagements within Uganda and India. In concomitantly re-examining discourses of queer visibility in and from the Global Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2022