Introduction

Abstract

What does queer studies have to say about empire, globalization, neoliberalism, sovereignty, and terrorism? What does queer studies tell us about immigration, citizenship, prisons, welfare, mourning, and human rights? Such emergencies include the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of the welfare state; the Bush administration's infinite "war on terrorism" and the acute militarization of state violence; the escalation of U.S. empire building and the clash of religious fundamentalisms, nationalisms, and patriotisms; the devolution of civil society and the erosion of civil rights; the pathologizing of immigrant communities as "terrorist" and racialized populations as "criminal"; the shifting forms of citizenship and migration in a putatively "postidentity" and "postracial" age; the politics of intimacy and the liberal recoding of freedom as secularization, domesticity, and marriage; and the return to "moral values" and "family values" as a pro-phylactic against political debate, economic redistribution, and cultural dissent. Indeed, in this intense time of war and death, and of U.S. unilat-eralismand corporate domination, queer studies now more than ever needs to refocus its critical attentions on public debates about the meaning of democracy and freedom, citizenship and immigration, family and community , and the alien and the human in all their national and their global manifestations. What does queer studies have to say about empire, globalization, neoliberalism, sovereignty, and terrorism? What does queer studies tell us about immigration, citizenship, prisons, welfare, mourning, and human rights? What is the relationship between Lawrence v. Texas, the exalted June 2003 Supreme Court decision decriminalizing gay sex, and the contem-poraneous USA PATRIOT Act? If mainstream media attention to queer lives and issues has helped to establish the social and legal foundation for the emergence of gay marriage, family, and domesticity, what are the social costs of this new visibility? And how does the demand for marriage and legal rights affect, run counter to, or in fact converge with conservative promotion of traditional marriage? While queer studies in the past has rarely addressed such broad social concerns, queer studies in the present offers important insights. In recent years, scholars in the field have produced a significant body of work on theories of race, on problems of transnationalism, on conflicts between global capital and labor, on issues of diaspora and immigration, and on questions of citizenship, national belonging, and necropolitics. 1 The various essays gathered here insist that considerations of empire, race, migration , geography, subaltern communities, activism, and class are central to the continuing critique of queerness, sexuality, sexual subcultures, desire, and recognition. At the same time, these essays also suggest that some of the most innovative and risky work on globalization, neoliberalism, cultural politics, subjectivity, identity, family, and kinship is happening in the realm of queer studies. As a whole, this volume reevaluates the utility of queer as ST84-85-01_Intro.indd 2