States (Alexander, 1994, pp. 5-23; Alexander, 1991). As she beautifully shows, this same 'erotic autonomy' is the place from which individuals and groups have staged various rebellions. Taken together, the work of Alexander and Cohen illustrates both a set of nettlesome political problems and a theoretical puzzle, across a black diaspora that is at the centre of the black/queer/diaspora project: Is there any place where the benefits and recognition of citizenship can accrue to the unruly - the 'prostitute', homosexual, 'welfare queen', transgender person, or the black? What calculus emerges when these gendered, raced and sexed categories of the non-national, deviant, non-ethnic/racial, non-conforming, or merely 'other' are compounded? One of the major contributions of the black/ queer/diaspora project is to show that 'diaspora' constitutes a way out of the nation State. Failing inclusion as a properly hygienic citizen or subject, where is the place for the black queer? This query also pointedly suggests that the notion of citizenship, with its obvious rules of exclusion and exception, stands in for a wider range of assurances and freedoms, since non-State actors like families, cultural groups and especially religious organizations, often think like a State - making strange bedfellows with repressive State apparatus in their support for projects of respectability. Their shared project is to discipline individuals into local legibility and particular forms of subjectification. An assortment of players, including Muslim clerics in northern Nigeria, Christian fundamentalists governing the Statehouse of Indiana and other areas of the United States of America, and government officials in the Caribbean and East Africa, citing their personal conservative Christian and Hindu religious beliefs, erroneously imagine a moment before the experience of same-sex desire, and support the enactment or continuation of 'anti-gay' legislation. As they perform a celebration of sexual diversity