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MASSAD Joseph Re Orienting Desire The Gay International and The Arab World

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659 views25 pages

MASSAD Joseph Re Orienting Desire The Gay International and The Arab World

Texto de Joseph Massad.

Uploaded by

Anna Karenina
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World Joseph Massad On of the more compelling issues to emerge out of the gay movement in the last two decades is the universalization of “gay rights.” This project has appropriated the prevailing U.S. discourse on human rights in order to launch itself on an international scale. Following in the footsteps of the white Western women's movement, which had sought to universalize its issues through imposing its own colonial feminism on the women’s movernents in the non-Westem world —a situation that led to major schisms from the outset—the gay movement has adopted a similar missionary role. Organizations dominated by white Western males (the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA] and the Interna- tional Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission [IGLHRC]) sprang up to defend the rights of “gays and lesbians” all over the world and to advocate on their behalf. ILGA, which was founded in 1978 at the height of the Carter admin- istration’s human rights campaign against the Soviet Union and Third World ene- mies, asserts that one of its aims is to “create a platform for lesbians, gay me bisexuals, and transgendered people internationally, in their quest for recog: tion, equality, and liberation, in particular through the world and regional confer- Mervat Hatem has urged me to write this article for over ten years, while Neville Hoad has urged ‘me to write it for seven. I thank them both for continuing to push me and hope that they are not dis- appointed with the outcome, An eather version ofthis essay was presented at the Sawyer Seminar ‘conference Hatred: Confronting the Other, held at the University of Chicago on 12 February 2000. 1 thank Elizabeth A. Povineli for inviting me to parurpate Pail Culture V2): 361-385 Copyright © 2002 by Duke Unversity Press 361 Public Culture ences”! As for IGLHRC, which was founded in 1994, its mission is to “protect and advance the human rights of all people and communities subject to discrimi- nation or abuse on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV sta- tus.”2 It is these missionary tasks, the discourse that produces them, and the orga- nizations that represent them that constitute what I call the Gay International. Like the major U.S.-based human rights groups (Human Rights Watch, “Amnesty International) and many white Western feminist organizations, the Gay International has reserved a special place for the Muslim world in both its dis- course and its advocacy. This orientalist impulse, borrowed from predominant representations of the Arab and Muslim worlds in the United States and Europe, ‘continues to guide all branches of the human rights community. As a relative Jatecomer to this assimilationist project, the Gay International has had to catch up quickly. To do so, supporters of the Gay International’s missionary tasks have produced two kinds of literature on the Muslim world: an academic literature of historical, literary, and anthropological accounts, written mostly by white male European or American gay scholars, which purport to describe and explain “homosexuality” in the past and present of the Arab and Muslim worlds; and journalistic accounts of the lives of so-called gays and (much less so) lesbians in the contemporary Arab and Muslim worlds. The former seeks to unravel the mystery of Islam to a Western audience, whereas the latter aims to inform white gay sex-tourists about the region. The larger mission, as I describe below, is to berate Arab and Muslim “gays and lesbians” from the oppression under which they allegedly live by transforming them from practitioners of same-sex contact into subjects who identify as homosexual and gay. The following remarks may be taken as typical. Lisa Power, co-secretary general of ILGA, states that “most Islamic cultures don't take kindly to organized homosexuality, even though male homoeroticism is deep within their cultural roots! . . . most people are too ner- ‘vous to organize, even in countries with a high level of homosexuality.” Robert 1. Jnternational Lesbian and Gay Association Constitution, see. C, art. 2, clause i. Available on- wwwilza.org. ‘Intemational Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Corumussion, “Our Mission." Available on-line at swwor ighhre-org. '3, Bruce Dunne’s “Homosexuality in the Middle East: An Agenda for Histoncal Research,” Arab ‘Studies Quarterly 12, no. 34 (1990). 55-82 is a notable exception to this poor scholarship. tis worth noting, however, that Dunne does not eite a single original Arabic source. Dunne’s anthropological impulse, moreover, gets the best of him m a later article cited below “4, Quoted in Rex Wockner, “Homosexuality in the Arab and Mosiem World” m Coming Out: An “Anthology of Internauonal Gay and Lesbian Writings, ed. Stephan Likosky (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 105, This article was reprinted in a number of U.S. gay and lesbian magazines including Ont- 362 oe WE ‘Bray, public information director for the, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and an officer of ILGA, understands that “cultural differences make the defini- ‘tion and the shading of homosexuality different among peoples. ... But I see the real question as one of sexual freedom; and sexual freedom transcends cultures.” Describing his adventures in Morocco and southern Spain, Bray states that “at Teast one guy expressed a longing to just be gay and not have to live within the prescribed sexual behaviors, and he said that there were others like him.” Seem- ingly convinced by this one conversation, Bray declares: “I believe this longing is universal."s In contradistinction to the liberatory claims made by the Gay International in relation to what it posits as an always already homosexualized population, I argue that it is the discourse of the Gay International that both produces homo- sexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist, and represses same-sex desires and practices that refuse to be assimilated into its sexual episte- mology.* I show how this discourse assumes prediscursively that homosexuals, ‘gays, and lesbians are universal categories that exist everywhere in the world, and based on this prediscursive axiom, the Gay International sets itself the mis- sion of defending them by demanding that their rights as “homosexuals” be granted where they are denied and be respected where they are violated. In doing so, however, the Gay International produces an effect that is less than lib- ratory. ‘The Gay International, through its most well-known organization, ILGA, launched a new and aggressive universalization campaign in 1994, coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. After ILGA achieved official NGO status at the United Nations in 1993 (which it later lost), its inter- national activities intensified, including efforts to stop “the mass execution of homosexuals in Iran,” an unsubstantiated propagandistic claim that was also bandied about by an official of the U.S. State Department.’ Part of the commem- lines, BLK, the Weekly News (Miami), and Capital Gay (London) tis notable that this “international” anthology relies upon a white gay American to contribute an article on gays in the Arab and Muslim wortds. 5. Wockner, “Homosexuality” 116 6. Because most ofthis literature deals with male homosexuality, my comments are likewise con- ‘cerned primarily with that issu. 7. Mark Unger, "Going Global, The Intemationalization of the Gay and Lesbian Community.” Metrosource: The Gay Guide to the Metropolitan Area, summer 1994, 49, See Wockner, “Homosexu- ality?” 107-111 for evidence of the Gay International's collaboration withthe U.S. State Department to malign the Iranian government Citing a US journalist anda U S. State Department official who investigated the ase, Wockner claims that there were mass executions of homosexuals in Iran, 363 Re-Orienting Desire Public Culture rations of Stonewall was ILGA’s convening of its sixteenth annual World Con- ference, 23 June to 4 July 1994 in New York. Whereas ILGA boasted delegates from Western Europe, East Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the United States, it “was working hard to bring activists from Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean.” The commemorations included the “International March on the United Nations to Affirm the Human Rights of Lesbian and Gay People,” which called for, among other things, the proclamation of an “International Year of the Lesbian and Gay People (possibly 1999),” and the application of the UN’s Uni versal Declaration of Human Rights to “lesbian, gay, bisexual, drag and trans- gender people”? This aggressive campaign at the United Nations has continued throughout the 1990s into the present. Rex Wockner, the author of an acutely othering article on “gays and lesbians” in the Arab world and Iran, which was reprinted in a large number of gay publi- cations in the United States and Britain, appears baffled by Arab and Iranian men who practice both “insertive” same-sex and different-sex contact and refuse the ‘Western identification of gayness: “Is this hypocritical? Or a different world?” he marvels, “Are these ‘straight’ men really ‘gays’ who are overdue for liberation? Or are humans by nature bisexual, with Arab and Moslem men better tuned into reality than Westerners? Probably all the above:”"° It is precisely this perceived instability in the desires of Arab and Muslim men that the Gay International seeks to stabilize, as its polymorphousness confounds gay (and straight) sexual epistemology. As I show below, the assumptions underlying the mission of the Gay International demand that these resistant “Oriental” desires, which exist, according to Wockner, in “oppressive—and in some cases murderous—home- ands,” be re-oriented to and subjected by the “more enlightened” Occident.!! This essay surveys the literature of the Gay International with an eye to the poli- tics of representation it enacts and its stated project of “defending gays and les- bians.” Although I look at different kinds of literature —academic studies, jour- nalistic accounts, and human rights and tourism publications—which are governed by different professional demands, political configurations, markets, and audi- Although the officia’s nvestygation produced no documentary evidence, the official asserts that the allegation of mass executions was “probably true"(108). 8 Unger, “Going Global,” 50. It should be noted that itis not clear whether these delegates were andeed residents of the countries they represented or U.S.~based diaspora members ofthese regions. 9. See the list of “The Demands of Stonewall 25" m Metrosource: The Gay Guide to the Metro- politan Area, summer 1994, 46~47. 10. Woekner, “Homosexuality,” 115. 11 Wockner, “Homosexuality” 107,115. 364 TT Tn TET i ences, I do not seek to flatten them by erasing these differences but rather to demonstrate how, despite these manifest differences, a certain ontology and epis- temology are taken as axiomatic by all of them. Representing Arab and Muslim Desires Western gay interest in and representations of sexuality in the Arab and Muslim ‘worlds coincided with the emergence of Western gay scholarship on sexuality.!2 It was John Boswell who inaugurated a debate on the Muslim world in which Western white gay scholars arc still engaged. Boswell’s romantic and unsup- ported assertion that “most Muslim societies have treated homosexuality with indifference, if not admiration” was in fact a familiar claim: Christian portrayals of the Muslim world as immoral and sexually licentious have been around for centuries. Indeed, as Jeffrey Weeks informs us, “many Western gays, for a long time now, have traveled hopefully to the Muslim world and expected to find sex- ual paradise.”'* He explains, however, that “reality is more complex” (x). Draw- ing upon the findings of a collection of articles edited by Arno Schmitt and Jehoeda Sofer, Weeks asserts that “the sexual privileges allowed to men [in the Muslim world] are largely at the expense of women” and that “those adult men who do not fit readily into prevailing notions of true manhood . . . are often looked down upon and despised” (x). Weeks views the present Muslim world as undergoing transformation and concludes that there are two possible outcomes of this change: “Only time will tell whether that culture will approximate more and more to the secularised Western model, or come increasingly under the sway of a new religious militancy. What can be said with some assurance is that it is unlikely to stay the same” (xi). Weeks reflexively adopts the Western model as. the only possible—and universally applicable—liberatory telos.15 12, Although homoerote and sexual representations of Arab men by Western male wnters pre- cede this period (examples include Wilham S. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, T E Lawrence, André Gide, Roland Barthes, and Jean Genet), these neither consttuted a genre nor precipitated afull-fedged dis- ‘course among Western gay men about Arab male sexual desires. They were rather offshoots of stan-

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