Chapter 7 - The Shock of Relation

Summary

This chapter considers the entanglements between queerness and diaspora. It asks how the vital matter of desire – who we love and how – is roused by the traversing of borders. In particular, it considers the gestures of compliance and knowing, an aesthetic knowledge no less, that queer asylees must evince to be found credible enough to receive political shelter and hospitality in the West. The border regime’s regulations of refugee passage on the basis of ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’ ultimately reveals a host of tendencies, definitions and differentiations that cleave our efforts to truly understand queerness as a thwarting of sexual rigidities and an embrace of play. The chapter ultimately makes the case that the genre of queer diasporic literature – a genre specifically concerned with sexual and national border crossings – attends to the caprice of non-normative desire.