In Unruly Visions, Gayatri Gopinath brings queer studies to bear on investigations of diaspora and visuality, tracing the interrelation of affect, archive, region and aesthetics through an examination of a wide range of contemporary queer visual culture. Spanning film, fine art, poetry and photography, these cultural forms—which Gopinath conceptualizes as aesthetic practices of queer diaspora—reveal the intimacies of seemingly disparate histories of (post)colonial dwelling and displacement and are a product of diasporic trajectories.

Countering standard formulations of diaspora that inevitably foreground the nation-state, as well as familiar formulations of queerness that ignore regional gender and sexual formations, Gopinath stages unexpected encounters between works by South Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Australian and Latinx artists such as Sheba Chhachhi, Allan deSouza, Tracey Moffat and Akram Zaatari. Unruly Visions shows how their art functions as regional queer archives that express alternative understandings of time, space, and relationality.

The queer optics produced by these visual practices create South-to-South, region-to-region and diaspora-to-region cartographies that profoundly challenge disciplinary and area studies rubrics. Gopinath thereby provides new critical perspectives on settler colonialism, empire, military occupation, racialization and diasporic dislocation as they indelibly mark both bodies and landscapes.