The Queer Globe Itself

Abstract

The concept of globalisation is most often understood as a genderless, sexless phenomenon, signifying the processes of nation-states and transnational flows of capital as if they were purely self-referential dynamics. In spite of interventions into the critique by feminists and queers to personalise differences among those most affected by globalisation, the major discourses continue to inscribe the global and even the local as if abstracted, universalised categories. In fact, these authors take great pains not to ‘descend’ to particulars, even when they insist that they are interested only in the materialist effects. Take Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s influential work Empire, for example.¹ They write of ‘populations’, ‘subjectivities’ and ‘ethnic groups’, in their so-called ‘Biopolitics’ (Empire, pp. 31–7). Significantly, though, they treat ‘capital’ as if it were an active subject, as in ‘capital does relate to and rely on its noncapitalist environment, but it does not necessarily internalize that environment’ (Empire, p. 225). It is difficult, at least for this author, to imagine how capital could internalise anything. Nonetheless, economic processes, unmarked by gender and sexuality, are the dominant subject posed within their critique. Other familiar ‘big names’ in the field, such as Fredric Jameson, move considerations of identity and difference into the misty regions of heady abstractions that operate as subjects: ‘As you begin to watch Identity turn into Difference and Difference back into Identity, you grasp both as an inseparable Opposition.