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Your current browser may not support copying via this button. New Perspectives in Diasporic Experience. Social Sciences. Comparative Social Sciences. As such, this industry is not irrelevant to the consolidation of state power, but enabled by state and international policies that make such labour necessary. This point is reiterated by one unidentified interviewee who comments at length about the increased sex trade between Western and Eastern Europe since the s.
At this point in the film, the screen splits. On the right, the camera offers an aerial view of white men in suits deliberating across the table of a conference room. On the left, text scrolls up the screen, detailing the shape and form of the kinds of labour that comprise the highly gendered migration at the film's focus: marriage migrant, cabaret dancer, prostitute, and domestic worker.
Under different names, these kinds of work overlap and collide as parts of the underground or illicit trade unaccounted for on global balance sheets. At the same time, at corporate conference tables across the globe, another kind of work transpires, and their clever juxtapositioning in the side-by-side frames begs the question that the video asks in so many different ways: how do we trace the paths between border brothels and corporate conference rooms so as to reconnect seemingly disparate points in the global circuits of capital accumulation?
Instead, the video redirects our attention to the vastness of this work, the large scale of this unaccounted-for economy. It wants, too, to demonstrate from up close and afar, the costs of the emotional, material, and physical labour that is the global sex trade. In the end, this is a video about work, about the material and physical costs of globalization seen from a particularly gendered vantage.
This strikes me as a compelling linking of questions of globalization and sex, migration and sexuality. Within the focus of the video, sex is a product sold within an illicit and lucrative market, and the camera's gaze is limited to women. At no point does the video take on questions of queerness, of gay sex tourism or male prostitution.
In my view, however, there is still much that a queer diasporic reading might gain here. For in the video's careful look at the global trade in sex, it suggests that we might begin to consider how these sexual practices are produced in relation to global capital and its circulation. More precisely, the video makes clear that the production of desire — not just sex but sexuality — is inextricably linked to the global distribution of capital and the shifting relations of power, surveillance, and protection across borders.
In recognizing sex as work, the video intervenes in a critical dialogue about queer globalization by forcefully insisting on the material value of desire and its relation to conditions of compulsion, coercion, and commodification. While the subjects that feature in Biemann's documentary are in no way marked as queer, her intervention positions sex as a kind of labour that is at the same time divorced from and articulated through sexuality as an identity category, such that the women recruited or stolen into migratory sex work are not given the opportunity to articulate the forms of their own sexual desire, even while their livelihood depends upon recognizing and fulfilling the fantasies of others.
That we do not know, and cannot know, anything about the sexuality of the women interviewed in the film is precisely the point. What we know is that the commodification of desire and the work of producing themselves as lucratively gendered and racialized subjects is what the trade demands. Most importantly, Biemann makes clear the utter danger of privileging mobility as a liberatory condition of globalization, instead putting labour at the centre of her gaze.
In the formal and narrative links she makes between boardrooms and brothels, Biemann insists upon the centrality of this marginalized and often invisible kind of labour. While it would be easy to see this sex work as just another kind of exploited labour, albeit along particularly gendered and racialized terms, at the same time Remote Sensing demands that scholars of sexuality take pause and consider how both normative and non-normative patterns of desire participate in the sexual exploitation of others.
As many scholars have argued, North American politics of gay and lesbian liberation hinge on strategies of queer visibility that often have counter-effects in other parts of the world, inspiring new policies of surveillance in homoerotic encounters and closing off important possibilities for non-heteronormative social and sexual desires Altman, ; Morris, ; Puar, Thus complicating the transnational spread of US politics of gay liberation, the mobile status of queerness is also troubled by the questionable circumstances through which gay and lesbian identities are formulated as mobile by gay cruises and tour companies that specifically market gays and lesbians.
Many queer subjects, no less than others, benefit from the privileges of race, gender, and class that protect their global rights as consumers, rather than citizens, and replicate the imperial framework that grants mobility as the privilege of whiteness.
Thus, the fact that the encounters in Remote Sensing are largely heterosexual ones in no way invalidates the question of how all forms of desire are articulated not against but within the uneven distribution of wealth across race, gender, class, and national lines.
The question then becomes how forms of desire and sexual identity that are transgressive in certain contexts can function normatively, even coercively, in others. Queer globalization studies must thus take into account how sexuality forms a crucial part of these uneven relations, through the regulations within which certain sexual identities are socially legible and internationally legitimated, validated by state laws and international policies.
I want to turn now to a more specifically queer venue for the further consideration of these questions, by looking briefly at another film that places the queer subject of globalization at the centre of the camera's gaze.
Filmed over a six-month period in Havana by a largely Cuban crew, the film debuted at the Havana Film Festival in and has since enjoyed an international circulation, screening in film festivals in over 26 countries. Sharing the spotlight is a group of drag queens whose contributions to the area, we learn, have helped to transform it into the notable community it is.
She made us face the herds of public we were afraid to face. She reassured us…. On the surface, then, this is a film about place, and about the local success of a community that has embraced members who, not long before, were targeted for harassment and persecution as sexual dissidents.
But Butterflies quite cleverly ties this narrative to the broader questions of development, both economic and ideological, charted most clearly through Fifi's own changing perspective on the place of these workers in the community. At first, she admits, she was skeptical. Her voice then accompanies a long sequence of clips from the community drag performances, as she elaborates:. At first I rebelled.
Through Fifi's guidance, we are thus led into an inspiring community of workers, all of whom attest to strong allegiance to the collective project of post-Revolutionary nation building. Not only does she intervene at several points in the film to lead us through the community and to tell, in greater detail, the success stories of its development, but she also offers us a model through which we witness a second transformation, in this case not across gender lines but political ones. The film refuses to linger solely on the local dimensions of this community, however; it takes many a clever route to its explication of how this local movement for social equality and queer recognition is linked to a national politics of queer repression, and a global politics of immigration and exile, development and scarcity.
This is acetate. In the swift gloss over these preparations, the film registers in one poignant moment the economic difficulties of the s resulting from the collapse of the socialist trading bloc and the US embargo Susman, ; Cabezas, The fact of loss and scarcity is not subject for further comment, however, and the camera's long pauses with each performer in her preparations gives us time to register, on this small scale, the kinds of adaptations signalled in these moments of making-do with what is available.
At the same time, the sequence strikes a determined finale, thus reaffirming the communal value of this process, and the labouringly gendered bodies it produces. Moments like these are particularly telling, for the camera resists the urge to go too deeply into the individual stories of these performers. Instead, it stays carefully focused on the communal process of their performances and, even more interestingly, on the material process of each transformation.
In scenes such as this one, the performers highlight the material production of these transformations, thus pointing to the extensive, expensive labour that goes into each performance.
There are innumerable examples. Each of these moments — in the disappearance of eyelash glue, fabrics, and makeup; the inclination towards US dollars; and the Spanish adaptation of American pop hits — reminds us that, however fraught, these performances take place within a transnational exchange of goods, ideas, and people.
Importantly, however, such transnational mobilities betray no particular diasporic privilege for queerness, and the film is unique in its refusal to valorize the US as the site of queer liberation.
Rather, this is a vision of sexuality and gender identity inextricably linked to time and place, one which enacts a highly localized vision of community, and yet is no less implicated in the material conditions of globalization.
Sign in Create an account. Syntax Advanced Search. Why Queer Diaspora? Meg Wesling. Feminist Review 90 1 More particularly, this essay argues against a prevalent critical slippage between queer and diaspora, through which the queer is read as a mobile category that, like diaspora, disrupts the stability of fixed identity categories and thus represents a liberatory position within the material and geographical displacements of globalization.
Ultimately, I argue, it is a focus on the labour through which the seemingly natural categories of gender and sexuality are produced, that a queer diasporic criticism might offer. Edit this record. Mark as duplicate. Find it on Scholar. Request removal from index. Revision history. Download options PhilArchive copy.
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