4th Global Conference
Monday 19th November - Thursday
22nd November 2007
Salzburg, Austria
Session 2: Desire Across Boundaries
Chair: Serena Petrella
Sexual (Dis)orientation and the Spartacus Guide to International Travel
Drew Shaw
Institute of English Studies,
School of Advanced Study,
University of London,
London, United Kingdom
When travelling with a backpack and an inter-rail pass through Eastern and Central Europe, I recently re-discovered the Spartacus International Gay Guide and wondered why I hadn’t purchased it at the outset of my travels: ‘[E]very gay man knows it, uses it and needs it,’ says the Spartacus website. There are ‘1300 pages of in-depth information about more than 160 different countries’. When I eventually purchased the 2007 edition at a gay bookshop in Vienna, halfway through my travels, it dawned on me that guides such as Spartacus are more than merely useful to gay travellers: I need never feel detached or disorientated because of my gayness, again. That, it seems, is the promise.
This paper will address the experience of travel and movement, dislocation and relocation, as it relates to the modern international gay male experience. It will explore sex and sexuality, the problematic of self-identity, and the manner in which group identifications can occur around ‘gayness’ in the era of globalisation. At the same time I will explore the limits of these identifications. Anecdotes of personal experience will be interspersed with a critical engagement with the Spartacus Guide to International Travel. The paper will also consider current globalisation theory and recent perspectives in LGBT Cultural Studies.
Is there now a global gay community? How could such a community have been constructed and what constitutes its trans-national bonds? Spartacus, it seems, facilitates international connections and champions the fight against homophobia and discrimination throughout the world. But can it also be seen as an agent of global capitalism and a force for Western ideals and cultural imperialism? These and other questions will be addressed in the course of my analysis.
White Power, White Desire: Miscegenation in Southern Rhodesia
Munyaradzi Mushonga
Department of Historical Studies, National University of Lesotho, Lesotho
It has been argued that European patterns of miscegenation in colonial
situations tended to be influenced by the demographic composition of
the population, and in particular the proportion of non-whites and
the ratio of white women to white men. While this was an important
factor, there are certainly other factors that have been overlooked
or that have not been emphasised. First, that Europeans used miscegenation
as a tool of controlling and dominating the colonized peoples as sexual
conquest tended to follow territorial conquest as an essential component
of the colonial project, and second that miscegenation itself was a
consequence of the white man’s desire and sexual appetite for
black women. It is therefore plausible to argue that European men were
prone to have sex with black women, not only from a shortage of white
women, but also from the need to exercise power and authority as well
as to satisfy their sexual desires for black women. The desire for
domination and the desire for ‘otherness’, the sexual attractiveness
of black women and the quest for the conquest of black ‘flesh’ was
also at the centre of the white man’s obsession with sexuality,
fertility and hybridity. While European men sexually abused black women
with impunity, they denied African men sexual access to white women
by legal means. In keeping their women away from African men, they
obviously underplayed the importance of private attraction and the
desire of the white woman for the black man and vise-versa, under the
guise of the old insecure feeling that white women might sexually prefer
black males if granted equality. This paper therefore argues that while
demographic factors may have influenced and determined the pattern
of miscegenation, European men needed miscegenation to control and
dominate the African peoples, while at the same time the phenomenon
itself was a testimony to the fact that white men saw black women as
sexually desirable and attractive. In Southern Rhodesia, just liked
in many colonial situations, it was therefore not surprising that Europeans
were ‘talking white’ and ‘sleeping black’.
Consent versus Harm: Thinking BDSM and the Contingencies and Constraints of ‘Limits’
Paul Reynolds
Department of Social and Psychological Sciences, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, United Kingdom
No abstract is presently available