Identity for Me But Not for Thee

I found this video on Facebook the other day, and it's a concise account of the biblical scholar Dan McClellan's take on New Testament sexual ethics.  Because it's short and captioned, I transcribed it.

This is just a brief reminder that the sexual ethic of the Apostle Paul has no relevance to today and Christians already reject the majority of it anyway. There are really only a couple of main points that are still preserved: abstinence before marriage and condemnation of same-sex intercourse. And those are preserved not because "this is god's will" or because the Bible says so. They're preserved because they have become convenient identity markers, and because they have become useful in the structuring of power and values in favor of the identity politics and the boundary maintenance of the relevant groups.

But everything else that Paul said is dismissed as just not for us anymore. Paul was a dogmatically celibate man who thought everyone should remain celibate, and you should only get married if you could not hack celibacy your sex should not be passionate because the passion of desire was for the dirty dirty gentiles who did not know God. Christian sex was to be holy and to be honorable, and the point was prophylaxis. Paul - because of Greek philosophical frameworks - thought of desire as a problematic product of our base material existence that we had to overcome, and so you had to keep a tight lid on sexual desire, and sex within marriage should only happen enough to screw down that lid tighter, so it was to be passionless and prophylactic and rare. 

So it was not about procreation for Paul. He couldn't have cared less, he thought Jesus was coming back too soon for that to matter anyway. So Paul's motivations for these things are based on social historical ideological philosophical frameworks and circumstances that simply don't exist anymore.  And so the majority of it has rightly been dismissed by Christians who recognize that it does not serve us anymore.

What we hold on to, we hold on to for rhetorical purposes because it serves our structuring of power and values, and there will also come a time when those things are rejected as not for us anymore.  It's just a matter of time. It's just a matter of when enough of us will decide that the utility to our boundary maintenance and our structuring of power and values is not worth the damage it does to the lives, to the mental health, to the well being of the people who are put in the crosshairs by the deployment of those things as identity markers.

This is wonderfully incoherent. I agree with some of what McClellan says, such as that most of today's Christians reject Paul's teachings on sexuality, though it's less deliberate dismissal than blithe ignorance of what they find inconvenient - a process that isn't limited to New Testament teachings on sexuality.  Liberal Christians especially ignore the end-times teachings that permeate the New Testament, for example, displacing them onto the book of Revelation.

First, Paul's sexual ethic is also Jesus'.  Jesus also regarded abstinence as preferable, while recognizing that not everyone could attain his standard.  Matthew 19:12 is the most explicit example, though warnings that even feeling desire merited damnation appear elsewhere in the gospels.  Displacing the anti-sexual teaching onto Paul is a popular apologetic move.

Second, their ethic didn't work for most people in their own day, not even for most Christians. But then Jesus taught that most people would be damned, so it didn't matter.  Probably their teachings work, or are relevant, for the same proportion of people today.  As McClellan says, a similar hostility to the passions was taught by some "Greek philosophical frameworks" of Paul's and Jesus' day; it seems to have been in the air.  It can be found in Hinduism and Buddhism too, and some historians think that Buddhism may have influenced Greek philosophy.  But those frameworks weren't embraced by most people then, any more than they are now.  That should be clear, if not obvious, from reading Paul's letters: they show him trying to impose his framework on his churches, and there's no reason to believe he succeeded.

McClellan says that Paul (and I would add Jesus) "was a dogmatically celibate man who thought everyone should remain celibate."  Of course.  We can see today that people tend to overgeneralize from their own experiences and hangups.  But "dogmatically"?  I don't think Paul would have been attracted by anti-sexual philosophy if he weren't already temperamentally in tune with it.  The dogma followed from his own inclinations rather than vice versa, just as people today latch onto biblical or other teachings they agree with, ignoring their context.

Best of all, McClellan acknowledges that Paul condemned "same-sex intercourse," which is not a biblical concept, but implies that Paul (along with other biblical writers) would have condemned "homosexuality," which is a subset of "same-sex intercourse," not a discrete or separate thing.  In other videos McClellan has claimed that the ancients (lumping together numerous cultures over a long period of time) didn't have "our concept of homosexuality" (lumping together numerous concepts within, presumably, the "modern West" or academic theorists).  

Apologists almost always do this, I've found (I've followed the debates for about 50 years): first they deny that the Bible has anything to say about "homosexuality," then they flip and say that it condemns "homosexuality." In the same way, orthodox Foucauldians will say that "homosexuality" didn't exist before the word was coined in the 1860s, then describe laws or attitudes that penalized homosexuality long before the 1860s, or use the word about cultures that have supposedly have no concept of homosexuality.  Before McClellan mocks antigay dogmatists for their incoherence and inaccuracy, he should consider the beam in his own eye.

McClellan is misusing "identity politics" again. Has he read the Combahee River Collective Statement yet? The way he uses it is what he calls a "credence," a shibboleth to show that one belongs to a given group: biblical scholars, say, or hard-nosed anti-dogmatists. It seems to be bad when others use credences, but not when he uses them.

There's an old witticism that if you marry the spirit of the age you will soon be a widow/er.  McClellan is aware of this, but he seems to think that he's exempt from it.  He seems to believe in progress.  The bad old dogmas will be abandoned, he says, because they don't serve us anymore.  But who's "us" here?  The values he rejects, he says reflect "our structuring of power and values," our "boundary maintenance."  What will replace them?  Won't their replacements also be about structuring power and values?  I don't ask this, obviously, because I want to retain Jesus' and Paul's sexual ethics; it's because I've observed that power is served by the culture of therapy whose values are served by elite professionals with their own dogmas, credences, and desires to control others.  All moral systems, including McClellan's whatever it is, including mine, are historically / culturally / ideologically influenced, no matter how sure their proponents are that they have risen above such constraints.  And the more sure they are that they are uniquely qualified to protect and help those who've been wounded by the bad old dogmas, the more wrong they usually are.

Blood Will Tell, Roots Will Show

I'm reading a fascinating book by the anthropologist Circe Sturm, Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century (Santa Fe: School For Advanced Research Press, 2010).  It's about controversies over who is and isn't Cherokee, mainly involving the federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma and North Carolina on one hand, and other tribes elsewhere, some of which are state-recognized and some of which are self-recognized.  These latter, who often claim Indian ancestry but can't always document it, are generally considered "wannabes" by federally recognized (or "citizen") Cherokees, and Sturm spends some time explaining the complicated categories involved.  She doesn't pretend to resolve any issues; what she seeks to do, and does very well, is talk to people on all sides, trying (in words she quotes from Clifford Geertz) to "figure out what the devil they think they are up to" (14).  She's not afraid to point out the contradictions and inconsistencies in everybody's positions, and to recognize how inextricable they are - not just due to bad faith, though they are often that as well.  I was deeply gratified, for example, when she criticized one Cherokee informant's gleeful account (pages 113-114) of his viciously misogynist takedown of a white woman who'd claimed to be a descendant of "a Cherokee princess."  To do this takes some guts, and my respect for Sturm went way up when I read that passage.

Becoming Indian is relevant not just to Native American cultural conflicts, but to most confusions and squabbles over "identity," drawing boundaries and gatekeeping.  I was struck by one citizen Cherokee of the Eastern Band's take on the role of "blood" and upbringing in the debate:

Consider, for example, what [Robert] Thompson said about interracial adoption: “Let’s just say I found this little white baby, and I fell in love with this little white baby and raised him as my child, and I spoke to him in Indian, and I told him the stories, and he knew my whole family history.  He played with his so-called pseudo-cousins.  When he’s all grown up, don’t tell me he’s not a Cherokee” (October 22, 2003) [144].

In an endnote, Sturm remarks:

In this hypothetical example of interracial adoption, the baby who becomes Cherokee through a family’s love and devotion begins life as white, not black or some other explicitly marked identity, such as Hispanic or Asian.  Not surprisingly, white seems to operate as the default normative category, second only to Cherokee [228 note 14].

But something occurred to me.  "Interracial" adoption is a vexed issue in many contexts, and much of the controversy involves the notion that a baby has not just an explicitly marked identity but an explicitly marked essence.  A baby is already "Hispanic or Asian" or "white" or Indian by "blood," and if it's raised outside of its ancestral culture, it will feel alienated and displaced as it grows up.  This is a recurrent theme in Becoming Indian, after all: many of the wannabes, no matter how little Cherokee ancestry they had, felt lost in white culture; and felt that their "blood" called them "home." The citizen Cherokees, no matter how dismissive they were of wannabes and "Thindians," tended to agree that if these unfortunates did have Cherokee blood, they would certainly have felt that something was wrong.  In another context, Sturm tells how, when confronted by some very white-looking Cherokee claimants at a public event, many in the audience clucked, "Well, if you've got the blood, it'll call you home" (150).

From this standpoint, wouldn't it be wrong for Robert Thompson to raise a little white baby in a Cherokee environment?  Surely when he grew up, his blood would call him back to his real people, no matter how hard Thompson tried to assimilate him.  Wouldn't that be just as wrong as taking an Indian baby and raising it white?  I don't think so, because of my white, European, postmodernist, homosexual values, and Thompson seems to be less obsessed with blood than most of the Cherokee Sturm talked to, but the idea of blood as an almost sentient racial essence runs through most of the debate about Indianness in this book, among both the wannabes and the citizens.  But so does culture: it's not enough to have the blood, you have to walk the walk and talk the talk.  Part of Sturm's achievement is that she bears down very hard on the contradictions.  (Does this remind anyone else of the debates over whether Barack Obama, who had a black father but was mainly raised by his white grandparents, was "really" black or African-American, because he wasn't a descendant of slaves and hadn't grown up in a black community?)

Yet I do have a bone to pick with Sturm.  Early in Becoming Indian she writes:

Although the term “queer” is often [!] used simply to denote same-sex desire and sexuality whether lesbian, gay, or bisexual, in this instance I borrow Eve Sedgwick’s (1993:8) definition: “The open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.” If we apply this definition to the case of racial shifters and examine the way in which they narrate and construct their own Cherokee identities, then we can see how their very refusal of normative definitions of Cherokeeness might be considered queer.

I decided to look at the context of Sedgwick's "definition," which Sturm quotes from Tendencies (Duke, 1993).  First I noticed that what Sturm quotes is "one of the things 'queer' can refer to" (Tendencies, 8); there are a couple more.  Then I noticed that Sedgwick referred to "the constituent elements of anyone's gender," etc.  Which means, for everybody, pretty much all the time: Everybody's queer, including me and thee.  I believe Sedgwick was aware of this. I'm not sure any human category signifies monolithically: the differences within a category are almost always more numerous and more significant than the average differences between categories.  Having invoked queerness, Sturm never mentions it again, and I think that's just as well.  Some of the wannabes / race shifters refuse normative definitions of Cherokeeness; others want their definitions to be normative, even though they may be more inclusive than those of citizen Cherokees.  The final question might be where those normative definitions (of Cherokeeness, or of any human group) come from.  As Sturm shows, the citizen Cherokees know that their definitions don't really have a firm indigenous foundation, especially insofar as they include being recognized by the white Federal government.  The blood quantum was originally imposed by the whites, too.  As for walking the walk and talking the talk, the Ojebwe/Dakota scholar Scott Richard Lyons wrote in his brilliant X-Marks (Minnesota, 2010):

That is precisely the “problematic” part of the peoplehood paradigm.  If you do not conform to the model – land, religion, language,and sacred history , ceremonial cycle, and so on -- if you happen to live away from your homeland, speak English, practice Christianity, or know more songs by the Dave Matthews Band than by the ancestors, you effectively “cease to exist” as one of the People [139].

According to Sturm, some Indian scholars are now trying to resolve this conundrum by describing "Cherokee identity politics as 'a battle over sovereignty'" (181). The Cherokee anthropologist Michael Lambert, whose discussion of sovereignty she quotes, argues that "A sovereign people [does] not have to meet any cultural expectations" (ibid.).  I think that's a good point, but I wonder how many Cherokee will agree with him.

Identity Politics You Can Believe In

I had an odd, educational conversation in a gay chat room earlier today. I was making small talk with another American, who's about to make his first trip to Korea; he is from California, and mentioned how upset he was by Proposition 8. We agreed that the No on 8 campaign had not been very well run, and I said that I thought part of the problem is that many gay people, including younger ones, seem to be denying the continuing force of homophobia/antigay bigotry in the US.

There's something paradoxical going on with that, because on one hand they are highly aware of bigotry as a threat before they come out, but on the other, when it comes to something like same-sex marriage, they seem to be living in a TV movie where all you have to do is assert The Right Thing and everyone magically comes around in time for the end credits. Maybe one bad-guy bigot remains, but he or she is either ridiculed or exiled. So a lot of the opponents of Proposition 8 seemed to be taken utterly by surprise when they encountered real, serious, deep-rooted opposition. (I mean, like, it's marriage, and marriage is good! Everybody should get married! And it's about equality, and equality is good! How could anyone be against it?)

But it wasn't just kids I had in mind. The professional operatives who ran No on 8 seemed equally unprepared, evidently thinking that a few TV ads would send Evil Mr. Proposition 8 back to his den, muttering "Curses! Foiled again!" Given that money was tight, a volunteer-based grass-roots campaign would have been much more cost-effective. (A California-based friend reminded me soon after the debacle that No on 8 had to compete with the Obama campaign for money and youthful idealism, which is a fair point; but the professionals tend to be opposed to grass-roots work on principle.)

Anyway, my interlocutor and I had just agreed about the denial at work in a lot of gay people's reactions to bigotry when another guy in the chat room intervened. (Thirty years old, Caucasian, chatting from Korea.) He told us that for most gay people, marriage isn't an issue, since marriage is a dying institution. Gay teens don't care about it (!), so they didn't get involved in No on 8. Marriage, he declared, should not be a civil institution. But Proposition 8 was the first time discrimination had been written into a constitution. What he said, aside from being wrong-headed (In My Hubristic Opinion), was irrelevant to what we'd been talking about, and I told him so: we'd been talking primarily about the adults who ran the No on 8 campaign, and that younger people's sense of denial about bigotry had nothing particular to do with marriage. I told him that marriage wasn't a big issue for me either (though I might have added that the young gay kids I work with on Speakers Bureau are mostly very pro-marriage -- more like pro-wedding, really). And even keeping it on his level, Colorado's Amendment 2, which also inscribed anti-gay discrimination into a state constitution, predated Prop 8 by sixteen years. Yes, it was overturned by the Supreme Court; Proposition 8 may also fall, one way or another. But it was not the first, not even the first state constitutional amendment to define same-sex marriage out of existence.

What really seemed to concern this guy, though, was "identity politics" and "playing victim," with an accompanying sense of entitlement, all of which he called "pathetic." He argued that we should just treat people as individuals, not as colors or sexes or sexual orientations, which is what he did, and what was I doing to change society that was as significant as that? I commented that he was throwing out prefabricated boilerplate phrases, and pointed out that antigay bigots, along with Teabag Nation and Republicans generally, also like to present themselves as victims. It's not limited to the standard minorities, who do have real grievances for being treated as their skin color, their sex, their sexual orientation.

He then flipped stances and argued that organizing was the only way we were going to change society, and how did I propose to get gay teens involved in the fight for gay marriage? I reminded him that I don't care if gay teens get involved in that fight, and asked him why he had suddenly decided that "identity politics" was not pathetic after all but a necessary tool for organizing, and why gay marriage was suddenly worth fighting for? He didn't seem to have an answer, and resorted to bluster: so what was I doing for equality and change? I asked him why I should bother to talk to someone who'd simply ignored the content of the conversation he'd joined, who had nothing but slogans to contribute, and kept changing his principles from minute to minute without, apparently, being aware that he was doing so. And there it more or less rested; it was lunch time, and I saw no point in continuing the conversation. (The first guy had dropped out of it early on, to run errands of his own.)

For the record, my personal contribution to equality and change is uncommendably modest. Deciding to be openly gay in a Midwestern college town in 1971 was still a fairly bold decision for the time, and I know I had an effect on the opinions of numerous people, gay and straight, but I'm fully aware of the limitations of such individual choices. I got involved in gay organizations as soon as I found some, but I often found them frustrating because they seemed to have been started without any clear goals, just because organizations were springing up all over the place in those days. But having organized, most people didn't seem to know what to do from there. A visible presence on campus and in town, supplying speakers to classes and other straight audiences, setting up a telephone hotline for peer counseling -- all these were good and important, and of course I'm still running the speakers bureau. Some people came to GLF meetings and demanded to know why we weren't lobbying the state legislature, pressuring Congress, marching in the streets. We'd say sure, do you want to get to work on that? They didn't, but they expected us to; activism as a job for servants. Nowadays there's a state-level gay-rights and lobbying organization, run by professional operatives. One of its presidents, from the 90s, was a gay Republican who, inspired by a gay Democrat to see the potential in gay politics, went from the closet to the head of a state organization in record time -- less than a year, it seemed to me. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it made me wary.

Identity politics has problems as a strategy, as black organizations (for example) discovered when Clarence Thomas was nominated to the US Supreme Court in 1991: should "race" take precedence over Thomas's record as a Reaganite collaborator who climbed to prominence over the bodies of his people? In the end it did so, to many people's chagrin. But identity politics is also a useful organizing tool -- is it even possible to organize people without offering them a group identity, a movement, to organize them into? Just about everybody denounces identity politics these days, with old New Leftists blaming it on postmodernists and postmodernists blaming it on the left and postcolonialists blaming it on the West, so that's an indication that something is wrong. Not that I know what it is.

The reason why today's conversation made an impression on me is that it summed up what is, for me, wrong with so much political discourse. Not just today (it's an old problem), not just in America, and not only on the Internet, but in print media and broadcast media and face-to-face interaction. Primed with slogans and misinformation, people don't listen to the other side enough to know whether, let alone why, they disagree. It isn't easy, as I know very well. The biggest irony was my challenger's insistence that The Answer was to treat people as individuals, when he couldn't be bothered to the listen to the individuals he was chatting with.

Some People Go Mental Over Billboards Signed "God" ...

Some people go mental over billboards with messages signed “God.” This is the sort of thing that gets my goat:

In fact, another activist, Anjali Gopalan, points out, that although there are gay men in India as well as something called gay-identity, “identity is sort of a luxury that doesn't extend beyond the educated upper-classes. The majority of men who have sex with men don't see themselves as gay or even homosexuals. ... we don't have a sense of self in our culture..." She adds that she was once indignantly corrected by a MSM when she made the mistake of asking him if he was "samalaingik" (homosexual) -- saying that he was a mard (man) not a chhakka (fag).

This quotation comes from Suparna Bhaskaran’s book Made in India: decolonizations, queer sexualities, trans/national projects (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), page 100. Bhaskaran is an anthropologist, and she says she’s trying to do something new, somewhere beyond the stereotypical Bwana anthropologist explaining the natives to you on one hand, and the participant-observer who goes too native on the other. But as far as I could see, Made in India is an utterly typical work of academic cultural analysis. Bhaskaran has an advantage, of course, in coming from India herself, but she’s far from the first South Asian to go native in US or UK academia, or the first anthropologist to study an urban commercial culture, or the first cultural critic to deploy the slash (/) mark for purposes of grimly earnest semiotic play. Not that it’s necessary to be the first, but since she’s walking a trail that by now is paved in four lanes, her self-advertisement in her own text is a bit sad in its disingenuousness.

But what's got my pants in a bunch here is the stuff about the supposed novelty of “identity” and “sense of self” in Indian culture. This is shown to be false by the example she gives, a MSM (Man who has Sex with Men) who insisted that he is a man and not a fag. This fellow is emphatic about his identity (he’s a man, dammit!) and he sure seems to have a rather vigorous sense of self. In fact, his sense of masculine identity is strikingly similar to that of many males in the US and elsewhere, who are fully capable of having sex with men without seeing themselves “as gay or even homosexuals.” It even turns out that, although this man doesn’t use English words, he knows local terms and identity-concepts that cover the waterfront of male-male sex and masculine adequacy. They may not correspond exactly to American concepts, but they are not absolutely incongruent either. But even if they were vastly different, having a different sense of identity, with different boundaries and content, is not the same thing as having no identity at all.

Bhaskaran goes on to say:

Although Khan does recognize the simultaneous importance of self-identified categories co-exiting [sic] with the more fluid meanings, the contemporary-indigenous fluidity discourses about MSMs create the binaries of indigenous sexuality/India versus "westernized" sexuality. Indigenous [!] sexuality equals unnamed, unconscious, playful [!] behaviors, and sometimes problematic gender role fluidity. A fluidity that is more marginalized (inequalities of income, cultural capital, and career options) but somehow more Indian in essence especially since it does not involve individuality.

Well, let’s see. First, “unnamed” and “unconscious” (?) behaviors do not necessarily equal “playful” – they can, and often do, equal furtive, shamefaced, and depersonalized. One of her sources, the dread Jeremy Seabrook, made this clear in Love In a Different Climate, which a lot of queer South Asians cite for its romantic, even Orientalist, picture of Indian exceptionalism, while ignoring its unflattering picture of the actual lives of those Indian MSMs. Second, “gay” life in the West is not monolithic: “inequalities of income, cultural capital, and career options” are mirrored in different qualities and styles of life among even the gay-identified – does Bhaskaran really believe that, for example, all American queers own houses on Fire Island? -- and “sometimes problematic gender role fluidity” is a much contested issue even here in the Great Satan.

We also have a large MSM population in the West, and not all of them are first-generation immigrants from the global South. Indeed, the term MSM itself originated in the West. This is really only problematic for people who dream of an Indian queerness that is “Indian in essence,” but calling MSM "a culturally appropriate term (versus the Westernized and elite term gay)" is tripping.

According to queer Foucauldians, we're not supposed to call people "gay" or "homosexual" if it's not the identity they prefer, or if "gay" or "homosexual" wasn't in use in their time and culture. "MSM" is an identity, but I'm not sure anyone actually uses it of himself ("I am an MSM"). Isn't it cultural imperialism to apply it to people who haven't adopted it? Seabrook wrote in Love in a Different Climate that Indian men who have sex with men generally don't think of what they're doing as sex; so it's certainly illegitimate, by these criteria, to call them MSMs.

The word “identity” turns up a lot in what I’ve been reading about sexuality in the West and non-West. As Cindy Patton has pointed out, “Current theory and …especially queer theory have become confused about the issue of identity because there are a range of competing populist and academic concepts of identity, as well as important differences between European and U.S. political experiences of calls to identity” (“Tremble, Hetero Swine!” in Michael Warner (ed.), Fear of a Queer Planet [Minnesota, 1993], 161). Relevant here is the frequent claim, or accusation, that identity is an individualistic concept, at odds with the supposed non-individualist East. While this is true of the kind of identity attested by, say, an ID card (which those Asian-values authoritarian states don’t seem to mind using), it is totally false of the kind of identities I’m discussing here. To claim an identity is to assert oneself as a member of a group, defined by that group’s collective qualities and practices. (Foucault’s notorious and much-misunderstood quip, “The homosexual became a species”, recognizes this. So does "coming out," which in its debutante and gay senses means joining a community.) Of course, everyone has multiple identities, which often conflict; some are ascribed, some are adopted; this is what makes identity so complex.

“Identity politics” is just about everybody’s whipping boy these days. I once had a conversation with a gay East Asian graduate student, trained in the US, who believed that “identity politics” referred only to the narcissistic activities of white, privileged gay men. I tried to explain that African-American racial consciousness is the paradigm case of identity politics in the US, but that the term also covers Asian-American and Latino identities, feminism, a variety of nationalisms around the world, sectarian religious identity (like Hindutva or radical Islam), and so on, but without much success. To see his own identity concerns as stigmatized “identity politics” was too threatening, but that’s understandable. Just in the US, the old-style Left blames identity politics on “postmodernists,” while postmodernists blame it on the old-style Left and other essentialist ideologies – all the while ignoring their own practice of identity politics.

Bhaskaran laments – again, it’s a familiar trope, one that was deployed against American feminists and gay activists from the late 60s by our own indigenous Left – that she has often been asked, “Is Khush Sexuality a Luxury in the Geographic [?] Third World?” “Khush” is an Urdu term that has been appropriated by queer South Asians as an identity-politics label.

As such it appears to be one of those “elite” concepts that are a luxury for poor folks, but apparently are okay when the elites are educated South Asians, or when the word at least isn’t English.

Of course it's an absurd question, since "Khush sexuality" under whatever name has always, on Bhaskaran's own account, been part of Indian culture without doing it any detectable harm. I would answer that question with one of my own: Isn’t bigotry a luxury in the Third World, or anywhere? And while I'm on the subject, isn't ignorance -- of the much more culturally aware work of scholars like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Aijaz Ahmad, Gayatri Reddy, Ruth Vanita, Saleem Kidwai, Amartya Sen, Steve Derne, Vijay Prashad, and many others -- no less a luxury for queerfolk anywhere and everywhere?