Queer Histories and the Global City

This essay reviews three books that center on the globalized city as a key site for unpacking disparate queer cultures. Two of the books discussed make an explicit effort to deterritorialize queer historiography outside the global North. They focus on the everyday experiences of postcolonial subjects in Cape Town and Hong Kong. In a moment of intensified counterterrorism, necropolitical nationalism, and resurgent yet covert forms of empire, both works have much to say about how the lives of sexual minorities are simultaneously affected by and resist Western imperialism. Thus they also enter into an already ongoing debate in contemporary queer studies that challenges the normalization of queer politics as a product of expanding capital both locally and abroad. All three books trace the shifting forms of the nation-state and how it affects the lived experiences of queer populations in the city. In the process, they collectively refuse the seemingly axiomatic notion that queer subjects are always being homogenized by transnational capital and neoliberal cosmopolitanism. Rather, as Andrew Tucker suggests, the hybrid queer cultures present in the city demand a more nuanced understanding of how these communities are shaped by historically, geographically, and politically specific national and cosmopolitan ideals.