ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to provide the structures of looking, seeing, and being seen at work in the formation of colonial and postcolonial sexual subjectivities, and the centrality of the figure of the gendered subaltern to such formations. It examines the process, to make clear the mechanisms by which discourses around the formation of "lesbian" or queer subjectivity—even those that are avowedly feminist and antiracist—can rely upon and function in the service of familiar colonial strategies of subjectification. The chapter deals with a brief look at what can be termed queer South Asian diasporic cultural practices that undercut globalizing discourses of sexuality and that instead offer up a more enabling formulation of transnational processes of sexual subjectification. A growing body of work in transnational cultural studies, and anthropology in particular, attempts to think through the translatability and mutability of sexual subjectivities as they traverse national and cultural borders.
