Abstract
Christopher Pullen (ed.) LGBT Transnational Identity and the Media. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2012; 313 pp.: ISBN 978-0-230-30106-1, £55.00 hbk
Amidst burgeoning globalization, LGBTQ scholars have grown to recognize the role of mass media as important conduits for the creation of multi-stranded relationships between various localities, sites and spaces that enable the flow of LGBT and queer practices, identities, and institutions. This anthology is a useful and quite provocative addition to this emergent scholarship as it brings essays on the cultural, political, and economic exigencies of film and television in various parts of the world.
Each of the essays provides a credible instantiation of the importance of media as part of the circuits of dissemination, expression, and contestation of LGBTQ phenomena across nations and regions through situated analyses of specific media forms such as film and television. The range of the essays involves not only wide geographic expanse but also a diversity of topics such as Chinese and Hong Kong Cinema, Iranian documentaries on transsexuals, and AIDS activism in sub-Saharan Africa. These essays are fascinating examinations of the paths and routes LGBTQ cultural practices, identity categories, and institutions travel and circulate. What would have made the collection more compelling is a serious inclusion of new media including the internet as integral to the discussion. Despite this minor shortcoming, the essays adequately address the need for more localized case studies of mediation in LGBTQ spaces.
That said, the collection is framed around a problematic concept. Christopher Pullen, the anthology’s editor, posits the notion of a ‘transnational LGBT identity’ as one of the conceptual anchors of the collection. Other than the introduction and Pullen’s own essay that inaugurates the volume, this notion is never really taken up or engaged with by the other essays. The insistence on ‘transnational LGBT identity’, despite the editor’s attempts to ascribe a multivalent, fluid and mobile nature to this idea, assumes a coherence that is neither evident in the various essays in the collection nor in the wider global field of experiences. This notion also deflects the problems of citizenship and belonging, the role of state, and the ubiquity of the nation. Pullen’s rather optimistic idea of a transnational LGBT identity relies on an untroubled concept of citizenship/belonging that while putatively fluid is premised on futures involving ‘coalescence, comingling and transnational communion’ (p. 13). This turn in his argument unwittingly dispenses with the realities of conflicts, resistance, and upheavals that run rampant in various cultural and political arenas under the aegis of LGBT and/or queer especially within the confines of the nation.
In addition, Pullen’s initially bold and exciting gestures towards a ‘post-queer’ politics and critique are ultimately unpersuasive. His deployment of the Deleuzian idea of ‘becoming’ as part of these gestures is baffling as this idea is very close to the critical notion of queer both conceptually and theoretically. I understand queer to be less about identities and more about the shifting processes and engagements with the heteronormative. The editor’s healthy suspicion around ‘queer’ is well taken but it seems that his answer, based on its abandonment, is rather premature if not unfeasible. Across various national spaces where LGBT and queer communities are unequally situated within global hierarchies, the recourse to a singular identity frame becomes a pitfall and not a promising alternative.