SUMMARY:

This is a contribution to the discussion forum “Conceptualizing Society after the Modern Territorial State and Nation.” Tamar Shirinian offers an approach to postnational politics and social theory by exploring the potential of their queering. Specifically, she contrasts the nation-state, characterized by rigid social boundaries and a claim to control over the population, with the ideal of a “queer diaspora.” Moreover, she asserts diasporic existence as an existential and epistemological condition, rather than the marginal “leftovers” of the nation-state as the normative principle of societal organization. Shirinian shows that an insistence on rigid identities, even if subversive in certain cultural and political contexts, can be repressive in other contexts, thus sustaining nationalist and colonial structures of hegemony. Therefore, a truly emancipatory path leads toward the postnational rejection of static identities and territorial allegiances.