Mohamad Shamsi

Chapter 9

Postcolonial studies, in its analysis of marginalization and subaltern

domination, has tended to focus on national identities and borders and the ways

in which race, gender, and class are configured within the hegemonic space of

the nation, but, until very recently, has neglected seriously the ways in which

hetero-sexism and homophobia shape imperial, nationalist, and global power.

The elisions that this historical focus on the nation-state entails are not

remarkably different from those elisions of sexuality that prevailed before the

rise and influence of queer theory.1 Keeping in mind Gayatri Spivak’s claim that

the idea or sheer possibility of the so-called native informant is always already

inscribed in the academy as evidence in the production of disciplinary

knowledge on the culture of others (Postcolonial Reason 66–67), the elision of

which I speak may also be symptomatic of the historical tendency of

postcolonial studies to assign a more or less static (hetero-)sexuality to the

Other. As disciplinary European knowledge, which circumscribes postcolonial

studies in the West, has not adequately engaged the politics of sexual difference,

queer inquiry has begun to form a site of contestation, of rupture, to the extent

that postcolonial studies often reinvents the sex and gender codes of the West

that privilege not only heteronormative social relations, but also a matrix of

other normative ideologies pertaining to the body, family and kinship relations,
race, national identity, health care, and other social positions, categories, and

institutions.