Queerness (needs tag)

Published in the midst of the Asian debt crisis, Gold gives an account of Thailand's speculative real estate boom and the attendant cultural and economic logics that led to the 1997 financial collapse. In response to this crisis, Thailand shifted its currency from a fixed exchange rate pegged to the US dollar to a floating exchange rate subject to the vagaries of the global currency market.3 As an effect of virtualization, "there is no longer a fixed scale that measures value" (Hardt and Negri 356), making the value of floating currencies "maximally abstract yet real" ( 58). This virtualized value, typically associated with the financialization of capital, is produced through the persistent circulation of currencies unmoored from commodity production and fixed relations with other currencies. That is, the value of floating currency is produced in a "place where time gains the upper hand over space, where relations start to matter more than mere things, [and where] power's location is less important than its velocity through temporary obstacles" ( 24). While, as Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee note, the "circulation systems" of global capitalism are leading to significant cultural transformations (10), many theorists insist that these transformations do not result in a homogenous culture of global capitalism ( 1). Rather, cultural transformation is marked by locally specific incorporations of globalizing processes differentiated by heterogeneous scales, sites, and histories (Mezzadra 1). Furthermore, such cultural transformation is not merely a byproduct of economic determinants. Economic and cultural values constitute each other such that cultural difference is foundational in the production of capitalist value (Spivak 229) and is thus inseparable from the economy ( 1). Chua's narrator gestures to this relationship [End Page 112] when he states, "Economists explain how production takes place in relations between classes of people. But they never explain how those relationships evolve in the first place" (57). Using cultural forms to show how global capitalism produces economic value through the social production of "restrictive particularity" ( 27)—that is, differences produced to foreclose access to citizenship, higher-wage labor, and so on—queer diasporic critique offers a frame for understanding how labor power is devalued or rendered surplus in and through evolving particularities of sexual, racial, gender, and national difference. In a queer diasporic framework, culture indexes heterogeneity in the putatively homogenous domain of global capitalism. This heterogeneity marks not only the differential racialization of distinct populations (Hong and Ferguson 3) but also the "differential relationships" in nominally homogenous racialized populations (Lowe 67). To put this in the narrator's terms, queer diasporic critique—and, by extension, the queer of color critical project it contributes to—puts into relief non-heteronormative sexualities to explain how differential relationships, those where power is unequally distributed, "evolve in the first place" (Chua 57). I draw on queer diasporic critique not to emphasize how postcolonial capitalism "short circuits the politics of queer diaspora" but rather to emphasize the queer diasporic politics of postcolonial capitalism ( 10). In this account, queerness is politically ambiguous. The partiality, non-identity, and subjectlessness of queer, as a term with "no fixed political referent" (1), can as easily be the means of social regulation as of radical possibility. Thus, rather than excavate the potential of "unauthorized" subjectivities purportedly "beyond" capitalist political and economic formations, as David Eng suggests (Feeling 15), I use queer diasporic critique as a means of identifying ruptures in postcolonial capital's negotiation of heterogeneity. Multicultural recognition is a technique of virtualization that produces cultural value by rendering sexual, racial, gender, and ethno-national differences as substitutable and persistently in motion. It frames one order of difference in terms of another, compressing temporalities and geographies. As Brian Massumi explains, the virtual is a realm of potential where things "happen too quickly to have happened, actually," [End Page 113] where "futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness," and "where outsides are infolded" (30). As such, the virtual is both materially embedded and beyond materiality, historical yet outside of time. With their values produced in dynamic relation, socio-cultural differences are floating currencies that mediate social exchange such that the racialized, sexualized, and gendered subjectivities posited by postcolonial capitalism are virtualized by dint of the way those differences are framed as if they are the same. When read as a queer diasporic critique of postcolonial itineraries of multicultural recognition and the cultural forms that naturalize them, Gold offers a frame for understanding how this virtual equivalence "is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect" (Massumi 30) while nominal similarities of sexuality, race, and labor mark dispersal and disjunction. I. Toward a Queer Diasporic Critique of Postcolonial Capitalism In contradistinction to neocolonial travel narratives, Gold highlights the protocols of multicultural recognition that underwrite postcolonial capitalist governmental regimes while disrupting facile literary tropes involving encounters between cosmopolitan citizens and postcolonial subjects. As Chih-ming Wang notes, Gold also displaces multiculturalism as a sign of Euro-American liberal modernity and instead locates it as "an organic formation" of local Southeast Asian histories and "everyday practice" (20). Throughout the novel, the narrator deploys tropes of identity (e.g., gay hustler, hypereroticized Asian, returning son) in hope that his various performances of sexuality, race, kinship, and class will set in motion forms of recognition to provide him with a sense of wholeness. Yet these performances of organic, geographically delimited identities fail to achieve their desired effects, leaving the narrator with a feeling of fragmentation.