We’re excited to share “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,” the latest issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Edited by Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel, “Area Impossible” stages a much-needed conversation between two often-segregated fields: queer studies and area studies.
Within queer studies, the turn to geopolitics has challenged the field’s logics of time, space, and culture, which have routinely been rooted in the United States. For area studies, the focus on diaspora, forced migration, and other transnational trajectories has unmoored the geopolitical from the stability of nations as organizing concepts.
The contributors to “Area Impossible” seek to imagine and broker conversations in which “area” becomes the form through which epistemologies of empire and market are critiqued. They approach a queer geopolitics through exploring topics such as debt bondage, sexuality and indentured labor, trans theater, Dalit religiosity, and queer studies in Africa.
Read the introduction to the issue, made freely available.