Gender and Queer Studies

Gender and sexuality issues have been addressed by literary authors from the dawn of time. Conceptions of femininity, masculinity as well as non-binary identities, the relations among the genders, desire, sexual practices and their politics are recurrent themes in the multilingual literatures of our MULOSIGE regions. Yet world literature has not fully explored the gendered nature of canon formation, literary historiographies, and translation practices. More critically, the normative idea that feminism and ‘queer liberation’ emerge in the Global North and travel to and influence the Global South still retain validity.

On the contrary, the multilingual texts of our regions display different forms embodied practices, sexual ambiguities, feminist consciousness, and sexual epistemologies. Especially the texts pertaining to didactic or militant literature also convey anti-feminist stances, often via use of the trope of reversal, thus presenting male disenfranchisement leading to social dissent and gender and sexuality-related transformations as historical ruptures. The multilingual literatures from the Horn of Africa, North Africa and North India also challenge the narrative of ‘homosexual identity’ under capitalism represented by the rubric of ‘global queering.’ From a literary historical perspective, these literatures allow us to construct alternatives to the western-centric historical genealogy of the global trajectories of queerness.