Beyond transnationality: a queer intersectional approach to transnational subjects

Shephard, Nicole (2014) Beyond transnationality: a queer intersectional approach to transnational subjects. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis conceptually explores the becoming of transnational subjects. Critical interventions into disciplinary modes of knowledge production on such subjects have long problematised uni-dimensional, essentialist and identitarian approaches, but have had a limited impact on the mainstream(s) they address. In a postdisciplinary move, this thesis reads the literatures on transnational social spaces in migration studies, poststructuralist and new materialist insights on subject formation, intersectional approaches in gender studies and queer theory through one another to propose a queer intersectional approach to transnational subjects. Shifting the focus to the spaces transnationality takes place in rather than normatively defined ethnic and national communities, and interrogating intersectionality’s tendency to mark out particularly gendered and racialised bodies for intersectional analysis allows for exploring heterogeneity and multiplicity within transnational spaces. The queering of intersectionality disrupts the reliance on binary variables of much transnational migration research, towards a situated analysis of the becoming of subjects in and through the transnational space. In doing so, it not only complicates the here/there binarism transnational studies have relied on, but calls heteronormative assumptions underlying gender and transnational migration research into question, and draws attention to the relationship between transnationality, gender, sexualities and the (non-)normative alignments across those and other axes of difference. In an illustrative case study, this queer intersectional approach to the becoming of transnational subjects is then put into critical dialogue with the British South Asian transnational space through an analysis of scholarly representations of British Asians, the Channel 4 dramas Britz and Second Generation, and a Tumblr blog.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2014 Nicole Shephard
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
Sets:	Departments > Gender Institute
Supervisor:	Henry, Marsha
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/3227

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