Queer Centres and Peripheries

Abstract

Gradually queer theory, which emerged out of the particularities of academic and political situations in the USA in the 1990s, has begun to interrogate its relationship to the rest of the world. It is, of course, not surprising that analysis of (homo)sexuality from within the USA should be largely US-centric, remarkably uninterested in developments in other countries, even those as seemingly close in culture and politics as Canada and the United Kingdom. Yet there are signs of some interest in what might be termed ‘non-western’ societies, in particular the relevance of ‘queer’ to rapidly shifting notions of sexuality and gender regimes. There is now an extensive literature on the ways in which homosexuality is being shaped and changed by ‘modernisation’ and equally on how hostility to modernisation often expresses itself in the persecution of homosexuals. Very few of the discussions of ‘modern’ forms of homosexuality are posed in comparative terms; indeed, the vast majority are written without reference to similar developments in other parts of the world.