ABSTRACT
Or so we fantasize…. The myth of the queer child also presumes another myth prevalent in contemporary queer studies-that of the metropolitan centre as a mecca for queer community, self-servingly constructed by urban queers, where lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transsexuals, and transgendered people from the nonmetropolitan peripheries, such as the rural South and the Midwest in the United States, can gather to escape oppressive familial and social relations back home. Indeed, from the recent surge of books in the growing field of lesbian and gay literature, in scanning advertisements for queer cultural and political events, and in
looking at both ‘mainstream’ and independent lesbian and gay films, it sometimes appears as if the only places to truly self-identify as ‘queer’ are in large metropolitan centres in the West-New York, London, San Francisco, Amsterdam-where one cannot only experience, but supposedly articulate a more ‘authentic’ queer identity and fully participate in the various cultural, social, and political networks inhabited by other queers.1 Yet the field of academic queer studies has undertheorized geopolitical spatialization as a significant axis of analysis and its role in constructing queer identity, and queer inquiry has shown little interest in cross-cultural variations of the expression and representation of same-sex desire. Consequently, with its narrow Eurocentric, and therefore imperialistic gaze, queer studies has not seriously engaged how queer identities and cultural formations have taken shape and operate outside of large metropolitan locations.
