ABSTRACT
In an article entitled ‘Talking sex’, Dennis Altman (2000: 171-8) contends that the truly radical impetus of postcolonial and cultural studies lies in the attention both fields have shown towards issues of sex and sexuality. However, Altman proceeds to qualify this claim by arguing that the problem with queer theory is that it has failed to imagine itself outside of the ‘Iron Triangle’ of London, Paris and New York (ibid.: 176). The ‘development of genuinely new regimes of sexuality and gender’, he continues, ‘seems more likely to emerge from Rio, Manila and Soweto than the hyper-academicised hothouses of western theory’ (ibid.). The point to note, as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (2001: 669) explain, is that Western studies of sexuality have tended to replicate the tradition/ modernity divide, by reifying Euramerica as the site of modern, progressive social movements, while other parts of the world are presumed to be traditional and oppressive, especially with regards to sex and sexuality. Such studies have thus failed to consider how different nation-states, forms of governmentality, economic formations, and consumer cultures, produce and uphold diverse sexual subjectivities and communities in an increasingly globalized world (ibid.: 663-79).
