Queer Antinomies

Abstract

‘Tel Aviv Pride is supposed to be amazing,’ a tourist in Marseille told me recently, and when I said it might not be amazing for Palestinians, he advised me to ‘leave politics out of it’. Leaving politics out of it might be a good slogan for Pride in general. It certainly says something about why I have avoided it for so long. I still remember how horrified I was at my first ever Pride, in Brighton a decade ago, to see not only the police and the Conservative Party represented, but even the most dreary and provincial instantiations of capital, including a local gardening centre, which, if anything, I found even more anti-queer than the almost comically reactionary representatives of state authority. But if the relationship between many Black and Brown queers and the hegemonic LGBT culture industry is – at best – fraught, is there a politics to be articulated beyond either an uneasy embrace or a recoiling defensiveness? In Out of Time, Rahul Rao pushes back against what he aptly calls homoromanticism – the argument that homophobia is merely a Western import in places like Uganda and India – while remaining sympathetic to the underlying reasons for its articulation. Uncomfortable with the defensive idea that homophobia simply comes from ‘outside’ Africa and Asia, Rao is also attuned to the ways in which the language of LGBT rights has been recruited by powerful states and institutions of global capitalism for their own ends. Non-Western queers therefore find themselves in a temporal double-bind: between nativist romanticism and neoliberal modernisation. Part of Rao’s solution is to suggest that both options are unacceptable because both rely on a narrow and empty understanding of place: