Affective Mobilizations: Pinkwashing and Racialized Homophobia in Out There.

This paper focuses on the affective economies which materialize around race, sexuality and queerness in the British context to enable the production and mobilization of an exceptionalist discourse of gay-friendly and post-homophobic Britain (i.e., pinkwashing). The author investigates the discursive workings of pinkwashing coupled with the racialization of homophobia, through a critical reading of the BBC Two documentary Out There (2013a), written and narrated by British gay-identified writer, activist and artist, Stephen Fry. The documentary captures and is in fact captured within a global moment of human rights speculation in which some European nation-states have invested in affective discourses of queer futurities as a marker of their capacity for tolerance, in contrast to predominantly racialized subjects/communities within and outside of Europe, increasingly naturalized as always already homophobic (i.e., racializing homophobia). My reading of the documentary demonstrates the interconnection between pinkwashing and racialized homophobia as discursive inventions which depend on the mobilization of affects such as love, pride, terror, hate and (un)happiness, as currencies of governance. Far from being universal or abstract, I contend that British LGBTQ human rights speculative discourse draws on a highly racialized affective economy-which constructs racialized communities within Britain and racialized populations and states outside the West, as excessively homophobic, rendering pre-dominantly gay male British subjects (and homopatriarchy) as exceptional patriots.

"Homosexuality/Homophobia Is Un-African"?: Un-Mapping Transnational Discourses in the Context of Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill/Act.

This article un-maps the recent impasse between pro- and antigay mobilization around Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA, 2009-2014). Drawing on scholarly and social media sources, it summarizes the increasing influence of (U.S.) transnational evangelism that has precipitated a state-religious complex of "anticipatory political homophobia" in Uganda. If transnational evangelism against same-sex sexuality in Uganda has generated a strong reaction from global LGBT human-rights advocates, this article critiques this Western homotransnationalist response by analyzing its limited terms of operation, focusing on the ways in which Uganda is hailed into the biopolitical project of a Western queer modernity. The author focuses on the copresence between homotransnationalist mobilization and "homophobic anticipatory countermobilization" as (re)organizing/suturing a global ordering project that is deeply invested in biopolitics and necropolitics. This suggests that the global flashpointing of Uganda in the context of the AHA incites further questions concerning the transnationality of "gay human rights" discourse under neoliberalism.