Queer Diasporas

A presentation of essays that explore how sexuality and sexual identity change when individuals, ideologies and media move across literal and figurative boundaries. Speaking from a diverse range of ethnic, racial and national sites, the contributors illustrate how queer identity in particular is affected in ways that are as varied and nuanced as the cultural, social, and physical environments themselves. The essays address a range of topics, from the divergent medical and epidemiological understandings of the AIDS pandemic to 1950s lesbian pulp fiction. While one chapter focuses on the appropriation of religious ceremony by gay Filipino immigrants in New York City, another investigates the implicit connection between Jewishness and homosexuality in the work of Freud. The gendering of domestic rules in food preparation and consumption in Japanese society gives way to a discussion of Cuban and Jamaican homoeroticism as seen in the works of Reinaldo Arenas and Claude McKay. The collection concludes with a monologue by Walid , a young gay Arab living in the occupied territory, whose sexual and national identities change according to his sexual and social needs.