Quote: Gayatri Gopinath

Throughout this essay ["Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora,"] I have attempted to gesture toward the ways in which nation and diaspora are refigured within a queer diasporic imaginary. Nostalgia as deployed by queer diasporic subjects is a means for imagining oneself within those spaces from which one is perpetually excluded or denied existence. If the nation is "the modern Janus," a figure that gazes at a primordial, ideal past subject while at the same time facing a modern future, a queer diaspora instead recognizes the past as a site of intense violence as well as pleasure; it acknowledges the spaces of impossibility within the nation and their translation within the diaspora into new logics of affiliation. The logic of "pigs can't fly" becomes transformed, in the diaspora, into the altetrnative queer logic that allows for two brides in bed together, a marriage without grooms, pigs with wings. In other words, a queer diasporic logic displaces heteronormativity from the realm of natural law and instead launches its critique of hegemonic constructions of both nation and diaspora from the vantage point of an "impossible" subject.
--Gayatri Gopinath, "Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora," in Theorizing Diaspora, Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, editors, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, p. 275.