The Middle East: Global, Postcolonial, Regional, and Queer

The dislocations associated with modernity have driven scholarly, literary, and philosophical inquiries in various directions since the 19th century: Marx's materialist critique, Ranke's historical empiricism, Baudelaire's flâneur, Simmel's studies of urban anomie and alienation, Durkheim and Weber's sociology, and so on into the 20th and 21st centuries, and now reflected in this issue of IJMES on queer studies. Although there are vast differences among them, they share a compulsion to explain what appeared as massive reconfigurations of time and space. The proliferation of subjective possibilities was pegged to an acceleration of the former and compression of the latter; accordingly, on our radar appear the bourgeois, middle class, and worker in the long 19th century and gay, lesbian, and transgender in the late 20th, two moments of rapid globalization and subject proliferation. We are to believe that in the fullness of time all will be free and all will be good. However, in the here and now some must be unfree and some bad. The modern distinction between free and unfree, good and bad, subjects relies heavily on uninterrogated assumptions about the spatial origins, temporality, and trajectory of modernity. © 2013 Cambridge University Press.