Sodomy as metaphor

Whether it is at the grass roots or at elite levels, discourses of homosexualityhave become a prominent feature of global dialogue and debate in the contemporaryworld. The editors of a recent collection entitled Queer Globalizationsexpress it thus: “as the private is ever more commodi¤ed and the body is moreand more targeted as a site of global consumption, queer sexualities and cultureshave come to occupy center stage in some of the most urgently disputed issuesof our times.”1 Recent scholarship has also pointed to the signi¤cance ofsexuality studies for the study of the international, arguing that, “[i]f sex canlearn from globalization and transnationalism, these schools have much to gainfrom critical studies of sex.”2 Yet, it remains the case that for most scholarly approachesto the international, a systematic engagement with issues of sexualityappears as a new and radical starting point, unsettling of disciplinary orthodoxiesand to be quickly brought within the fold of established methodologies andapproaches.3 And while sexuality studies have begun to seriously consider international¶ows,4 they have not yet engaged comprehensively with the way inwhich sexuality has been deployed as a tool through which persons, institutions,and nations have negotiated their often complex relations with the international.What remains absent is an analysis of how sexuality acts to inform those meaningswhich help constitute the nature of what is regarded as the international—of the ways in which sexuality provides both a vocabulary and a locus of meaningto which individuals turn in order to explain and make sense of current-day internationalissues and events.It is this phenomenon that