Area Impossible ─ The Geopolitics of Queer Studies

Staging a much-needed conversation between two often-segregated fields, this issue addresses the promising future of queer and area studies as collaborative formations. 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 this issue seek to imagine and broker conversations between the two fields in which "area" becomes the form through which epistemologies of empire and market are critiqued. Histories of debt bondage; sexuality and indentured labor; Afro pessimism in African studies; trans theater facing obdurate transits; religion and the politics of Dalit modernity; the biopolitics of maiming: these are some of the conduits through which the authors approach a queer geopolitics.

Anjali Arondekar is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author ofFor the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, also published by Duke University Press.

Geeta Patel is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures and the Program in Women, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Virginia. She is author ofLyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings.