This essay explores how the Cold War conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union led to a tremendous reorganization of how Americans thought about identity, especially queer identity. The author discusses the activism of homosexual organizers who worked against state repression and then traces the shifting ways Cold War-era novels, plays, and poetry take up the subject of queerness and re-imagine the social possibilities for the homosexual citizen. The work of Tennessee Williams, Patricia Highsmith, and James Baldwin portrays same-sex desire as a social problem and records an overwhelming anxiety about the characters who are aligned with such desires. Later texts by writers such as Audre Lorde and Cherríe Moraga situate same-sex desire as a means of radical critique and as a site of connection. They make legible the active repression of gender and sexual nonconformity. This essay illustrates how ideas of queer freedom arise and transform in the shadow of repression.

This chapter picks up the discussion on gendered violence and gendered order established by the Nazarbayev regime. Never before did any movement pay so much attention to this agenda. Never before in the contemporary history of Kazakhstan did protest movements call out openly on double oppression of the regime – through its patriarchal and authoritarian nature of governing. In this chapter, I also focus on the ideas of class, inequality, and transnational dialogue of Oyan, Qazaqstan and Qazaq Koktemi with other protest movements in the world. Dwelling further on my argument about Qazaq Koktemi representing the fading of the post-Soviet era, I also analyse in detail the 8 March 2021 Women’s Rally in Almaty and the many actors united behind its call for de-Sovietizing and de-stereotyping this vital day of mobilization. I believe that the 2021 Women’s March opened many eyes to the fact that there is a vibrant plurality of views and activist forms within Qazaq Koktemi and that these forms are no longer chained by the old paradigms of the ‘gender’ question in Nazarbayev’s terms, with the tokenization of female politicians and persistent sexism in the political domain.

At moments of historical shift, the debates about self and society more audibly acknowledge that the boundaries of subjectivity are porous and fragile – and gender, sex, and sexuality are integral parts of these boundaries. While non-cis/heteronormative individuals and relations appear throughout this book, Chapter 6, “Queer Identities and Activisms,” conveys their various iterations in modern and contemporary Japanese culture. Regarding such men: no law prohibited or regulated same-sex relations in Japan – with the exception of a brief period from 1872 to 1880. Yet, starting with the rise of new academic disciplines, around 1900 came the modern desire to know the “truth” about sexuality, to several ends: to legitimize knowledge about human sexuality within the academy, to bolster social reform, or, indeed, to use that knowledge for nation-building and nationalist and imperialist agendas. This chapter describes Japanese culture’s long-standing embrace of gender ambivalence, covering a range of nonheterosexual and gender-variant identities, practices, and communities that have come into being in Japan throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: namely, early “gay booms,” the more recent “new-half” individuals, and the current activism of LGBTQIA+ communities.

The conclusion contextualizes the gendered materiality and the provisionality of same-sex love under precarious, postcolonial conditions and within informal female friendship networks that are largely marginalized from the global economy. It situates the meanings and shifting grammar of supi, the Ghanaian term for a same-sex girlfriend, in the wider context of Africa and its diasporas in a postcolonial world. “Doing supi” implies a capacity to “hustle,” improvise and operate on different registers. In this context where fixity in word and action appears to be both undesirable and unaffordable, a practice of negotiating multiple positions and identifications is vital to carving out personal space and foster wayward intimacies and subjectivity. Within this social fabric, the erotic emerges as a powerful resource and site of knowledge production. Thus, approaching the discursive culture of “knowing women” requires the decolonization of disciplined categories of knowledge with their inherent power relations.