From: Mark Rifkin <rifkin-AT-dept.english.upenn.edu> Subject: Post-colonial heterosexism... Date: Thu, 21 Nov 1996 12:09:38 -0500 (EST) To anyone kind enough to read this, I'm looking for some sources on "post-colonial" denial of either homosexual existence within a given nation or of active oppression of people defined as homosexuals/queers. To give you some background, this is in service of a project that attempts to examine the ways in which the discourse of degeneration in the late 19th century England served to produce Africans as savages (thereby effacing both economic exploitation and the question of access to political authority) as well as to imagine sexual deviants in England as "degenerates" and therefore "domestic aliens" of a kind. At this point, I'm trying to think through the implications of this analysis for current anti-imperial and anti-heterosexist politics, and I plan to offer the importation of the notion of "homosexuality" (as opposed to other conceptualizations of same-sex desire) and its patholocization in post-colonial (especially formerly British) nation-states as the result of the discourse of civilization (and its equation of normative sexual reproduction with cultural dissemination) formally propagated in England >from the late nineteenth until the mid twentieth century. So does anyone have any texts (books, articles, newspaper stuff, etc.) that could point me to non-Western, especially central African, countries that seem to have appropriated Western notions of sexuality and the concept of same-sex desire as deviant/disease. Thank you in advance. Also I would welcome any commentary on this project, either those who approve or believe me totally wrong-headed. -Mark P.S. Just so you know, this part of the project isn't just post-colonial nation bashing; I'm also doing a critique of the blindness of much U.S. and British gay and lesbian politics to their situation within the First World and the significance of that for thinking about issues of sexual freedom globally in non-neo-imperialist ways. --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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