File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1996/96-12-06.070, message 140


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.



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