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The question that is the title of this essay is an earnest one, and I pose it to index two related but distinct lines of inquiry that arise as we confront the relation between queer theory and diaspora studies. What does it mean to 'queer' diaspora studies? To pose the question more broadly, what analytical possibilities open up when we consider the relation between sexuality, identity, and desire on the one hand, and the geographical mobility, estrangement, or displacement of people on the other? This essay will approach these questions by considering how the contemporary conditions of geographical mobility - the diasporic condition that attends the circumstance of globalization - produce new experiences and understandings of sexuality and gender identity. In this interest, this essay thus hopes to contribute to the timely work currently underway under the rubric of 'queer globalization studies'.
This, however, begs yet another question: what is at stake in the tendency, in much of that very same work, to conjoin the queer subject and the diasporic subject as theoretical twins? In the increasing number of anthologies and monographs exploring the intersection of sexuality studies and globalization, it is the diasporic queer subject in particular who is called upon to bear witness to the political, material, familial, and intellectual transformations of globalization. As I will explore in more detail below, such work offers the diasporic queer as the exemplary subject of globalization, in order to posit an analogy between queerness as that which subverts gender normativity, and diaspora as that which troubles geographic and national stability.
Such critical moves rest on the following line of thinking: on the one hand, it is asserted, the nation, through structural arrangements of citizenship, marriage law, and immigration regulation, always and unconditionally privileges heterosexuality. On the other, then, queerness challenges not just the nation's familial metaphor of belonging, but disrupts national coherence itself (Eng and Hom, 1998; Muñoz, 1999; Patton and Sánchez-Eppler, 2000). Newly emergent from the debris of nationalism is a figure of the 'sexile', a gay cosmopolitan subject who, once exiled from national space, is therefore outside of the duties, identifications, and demands of nationalism, and is paradoxically liberated into free transnational mobility (Guzmán, 1997). Carried to its logical end, this binary would suggest...