Suchergebnisse

This essay investigates transnational sexual mobilities in museums that display same-sex materials: how these materials, the ideas about sex they convey, and tourists, collectors, and curators generate cultural and economic value as each of these moves among institutions and across regions. Based on visits to twenty-two sites, I consider how sex museums and other institutions that display explicitly erotic materials frame same-sex media and objects within Kantian cosmopolitan values of sexual universalism, individualism, and equality (Kant 1957, 2010). Rather than take at face value the claims to social justice that this framing suggests, I critique cosmopolitan norms of sexual universalism and the Anglo/European perspectives on which they rest. These museums undercut cosmopolitan gestures toward social justice for LGBTQ subjects by reproducing white, masculine, and heterosexual norms in signage, spatial layout, labeling, and the juxtaposition of materials. Cosmopolitanism requires amnesia about Europe's colonial past and promotes a contemporary neoliberal form of commodified cosmopolitanism, where global flows of ideas, materials, and people generate cultural and economic capital. I conclude by considering how these sexual mobilities may also produce queer contact zones, where the inadvertent juxtapositions of objects and people create possibilities for experiences outside the museums' discursive and commodified containment of same-sex materials.

Presents an argument that since the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, we have entered a phase of global civil society which is governed by cosmopolitan norms of universal justice - norms which are difficult for some to accept as legitimate since they are in conflict with democratic ideals

For many cosmopolitans, an emergent global civil society is re-framing the relationship between the universal and particular in world politics in ways that do justice to both. This article disputes this claim, finding that the concept of global civil society shares the same fundamental problem as state sovereignty, namely that it is better at articulating global identity than difference because it reproduces in different form statist attempts to describe a universal structure of particularity. It then argues that to avoid reducing difference to identity while remaining true to the cosmopolitan impulse to ethical universality, that is, to recognition of moral obligations to foreigners, it is necessary to take cosmopolitanism as synonymous with an ethics of hospitality enabling a nondialectical account of identity and difference in cosmopolitanism. As Derrida affirms, hospitality deconstructs the binary of identity and difference in our ethical relations with strangers. This dialectic-defying quality of cosmopolitanism-as-hospitality requires a greater decisionism than dialectical liberal-cosmopolitanism, turning cosmopolitanism away from the pure ethics of its liberal variants and transforming it into an ethicopolitics.

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Chapter 1: Setting the Stage: Performing the Divided Self of a New Cosmopolitanism -- The Cosmopolitan Subjectivity of the Divided Self -- Cosmopolitan Theatre: Trying on a New Definition -- On Methodological Considerations -- On the Layout of the Book -- In Lieu of Concluding Remarks -- Bibliography -- Part I: Encounters in Language -- Chapter 2: Dramaturgies of the Self: Staging the Décalage of Vernacular Cosmopolitanism -- Immigration and Multiculturalism in Canada -- Canadian Immigrant Theatre: On Aesthetic and Political Paradigms -- Vinci: On Décalage of I as Other and I as Myself -- Je me souviens: The Décalage of Internal Exile -- Fronteras Americanas: Staging the Décalage of the Border-Crossing -- Trois: On the Heteroglossia of Cultural Décalage -- Sœurs: On the Décalage of Cultural and Technological Mediations -- Bibliography -- Chapter 3: 'Speaking in Tongues': Staging Hospitality of (Non)Translation1 -- On Theatrical Multilingualism and the Practices of Linguistic (Non)Hospitality -- On Vernacular Bilingualism and Theatrical Transcription -- La Trilogie des dragons: On Dramaturgies of Encounter and Relexification -- Betty Quan's Mother Tongue: On the Dramaturgies of Immigrant-Speak -- Polyglotte: On the Dramaturgy of Canada-Speak -- In Sundry Languages: On the Canadian Multilingualism of a Common Space -- Bibliography -- Part II: Encounters in Body -- Chapter 4: Dramaturgies of the Body: Staging Stranger-Fetishism in a Cosmopolitan Solo Performance -- The Body: A Synecdoche of Cosmopolitanism -- Natasha Davis: Staging an Extreme Autobiography of the Divided Self -- On the Embodied Interculturalism of Anita Majumdar's The Fish Eyes Trilogy -- On the Mediated Self of Cosmopolitanism: Wajdi Mouawad's Inflammation du verbe vivre -- Bibliography.