Roopbaan

An LGBT platform in Banglades

Queering archives: a roundtable discussion

“Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion” provides a reflection on histories of queer archives studies, while marking out some key directions for the field\u27s future development. As a broad conversation about the career of the queer archival, as both intellectual project and political practice, this discussion focuses on developments and limits within North American queer studies of the archive, which emerges as a central object of analysis and is itself somewhat archived within the terms of the discussion. The roundtable discussion provides a sustained critical engagement with the profile of the queer archive as a site for radical struggles over historical knowledge, offering a renewed sense of the queer archive as a pertinent site for scholarship and politics across an array of orientations and tendencies

Kipling's famine-romance: masculinity, gender and colonial biopolitics in “William the Conqueror”

This essay concentrates on one of Kipling’s short-stories, ‘William the Conqueror’, first published in an American women’s magazine, and speculates on how a female audience might have caused Kipling to modify his (conventional) depiction of Anglo-Indian gender-relations. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s work and reviewing the history of colonial famine-relief, I suggest that the formal conjunction of the romance genre with the unusual setting of a famine-relief camp is the key to Kipling’s ‘gender-transactions’ in this story, and can be read as an indicator of the ‘biopolitical’ logic of the camp as a space of sovereign exception

Queer activist intersections in Southeast Asia: human rights and cultural studies

The practice of human rights elicits a range of theoretical positions and problems in relation to advocacy across Southeast Asia. This raises questions about the universal nature of human rights, the problem of cultural imperialism and the dynamic of the local and the global. These questions become heightened when connected to queer or LGBT issues. This paper focuses on the intersections of queer scholarship, activism and human rights in relation to LGBT asylum seekers from Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia in order to explore the potentialities, possibilities and difficult challenges queer activists and scholars face in translating human rights principles, values and actions across and between modes of activist communication. A special purpose of the paper is to explore how the discipline of cultural studies and its attention to everyday lives, identity, self-reflexivity and socio-cultural context offers a scholarship that is specifically attuned to the problematics and complexity of human rights and queer activism and their application in researching these Southeast Asian contexts