Politics of Piety

Saba Mahmood, in “The subject of freedom” discusses how Feminism and Islam can be easily critiqued within feminist discourse and under western perception as these two, neither can be seen moving parallel empowering each other nor seen as an agency for empowerment. She entails the idea of freedom and liberty is mediated by cultural and historical conditions to better know the power politics, knowledge production, construction of bodies and subjectivities. The women’s mosque movement for the society of Egypt seemed to be effected as they helped transformation. However, for feminist scholars it seemed to be a subject of scrutiny because of the ideas embedded with in this discourse of tradition and culture were rooted to women as a subordinate.

In my opinion, when we tend to give definition to “freedom”, it gets limited rather than extending it. It may be taken under scrutiny because freedom to me looks different than what freedom to my neighbor looks like. I was thinking about this question that she brings in her writing, “How do we conceive of Individual freedom in a context where the distinction between the subject’s own desires and socially prescribed performances can not be easily presumed, and where submission to certain forms of (external) authority is a condition for achieving the subject’s potentiality? (Mahmood p. 31)”

Israel-Palestine Queer Activism

This weeks reading dealt with how Israel hijacks gay activism to cover up the Palestinian territory issues. Specifically by showing support when violent acts of homophobia rise, Israelis present “it as an exception to the otherwise peaceful, tolerant, and liberal nature of Israeli society” (494). Hochberg analyses the exclusion of Palestinians from homo nationalism in Israel's gay rights discourse. Hochberg explains the cultural boarders between Palestine and Israel are often explained in simple terms are secularism versus religious fundamentalism which is what creates the idea that Israel is the forward-thinking side. Hochberg looks at QUIT!, a gay organization that claims that supporting israel is the right thing to do for the better of queer culture. Hochberg then looks at what it means to be a gay Arab and finds that people like Fanon, an anti colonial thinker, reject homosexuality as a lifestyle because it is a western idea. We see that Arab culture defines sexuality around sexual roles and to come out as gay means becoming something completely different. “first, his sexual desires will be unfulfilled because he will no longer have access to his previously available sexual object choice and second he will fall victim to legal and police prosecution”(507). This turns into violence because gays are often linked with informers and vise versa, “becomes falsely identified with a threatening Israelization of the Palestinian sociocultural setting” (508). Palestinian LGBTQ work to break this pattern of thinking but palestinians do not join the fight against homophobia using Israeli territory conflict while Israel exhausts it's gay support in order to paint a positive image of itself.

The following is a link to Chic Point Fashion, Hochberg mentions in "Visiting the Local Queer Scenes". It part of an artist who created this fashion show as a comment on Israeli check points that target Palestinians.

http://www.digitalartlab.org.il/ArchiveVideo.asp?id=325

Puar and Qureshi

Emram Qureshi’s article in The Boston Globe works well as a companion piece to Jasbir Puar’s chapter, Abu Ghraib and U.S. Sexual Execptionalism. By using Raphael Patai’s 1973 book, The Arab Mind, Qureshi’s article further shows how Orientalist tropes are manufactured by making sweeping generalizations that are extrapolated from dubious antidotal references; In the case of Arabs, that being nomadic Bedouin culture. The Arab Mind also acts as a contemporary and powerful example of how Orientalist discourses specifically on sexuality of Muslims have perpetuated into the 21^st century but more importantly how the acceptance of these fallacious tropes ultimately informs US foreign policy and concomitantly how U.S. sexual exceptionalism is created (83).

Orientalist’s notions of sexuality are reanimated through the “transnational production” of the Muslim terrorist as a torture object and the production of this identity is performativity constituted by  “the very evidence that is said to be its results” (88). The Muslim body informs the torture at the same time that torture forms the Muslim body. Torture acts as a confirmation of what is already suspected of the Muslim body. A body, where underneath the veils of repression sizzle the indecency waiting to be unleashed (87). This highlights the very themes that are found within Patai’s book which describes Arabs as only being able to understand force and that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and weaknesses (1). The Orient is now no longer seen as a space for unfettered sin but is rather transformed to symbolize a space of repression and perversion, and this notion of freedom once attributed to the Orient now resides in western identity (94). In doing so the US is able foster its own exceptionalism by putting of the US subject in dialectic with the Muslim victim. “The violence of the United States as an exceptional event” (113) creates a US subject that is morally and culturally exceptional through the very production of the victim as repressed, barbaric, and even homophobic. These claims are further grounded by the normativization of the United States own homosexual subjects (113). 

week 14

This weeks reading Puar discusses the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Because of the photographs that Puar mentions in the reading, Abu Ghraib was seen as a representation of mistreatment of prisoners by the US troops.  Puar argues that the torture of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib is exceptional because of how it has been constructed by American political leaders and media. In the reading Puar draws on photographs that were taken at Abu Ghraib, including a picture of a pyramid of nude men, which is a very infamous picture today ’’ Iraqi prisoners are arranged naked in human pyramids, simulating both the feminized prone position, anus in the air, necessary to receive anal sex, and the ‘activo’ mounting stance of anal sex’’.

President Bush claimed that the prison guards ’‘Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people’’, but Puar argues that American exceptionalism has been used to seperate the prison guards actions. Puar argues that the sexual torture against the Iraqi priosoners was a method of punishment, to attack the priosoners cultural morals. Towards the end of the reading Puar asks us to consider’’ whether these acts of turture really reveal anything instrinc or particular to American Culture’’?

  Both readings mention Patai’s The Arab Mind, which is a book where he writes about the perceptions of muslims and he takes on arab ideas of shame and honor. He also shows that Arabs are not more repressed than Westerners.

In this week's readings, Puar elaborates on concepts introduced in her previous chapter concerning homonationalism and biopolitics, connecting it to the Abu Ghraib case where Iraqi prisoners were tortured at length by US soldiers, sparking international debate and outrage. By expounding upon the notion of US exceptionalism, Puar explains how the Abu Ghraib case and its reception is a highly emotionally charged platform through which the US displays its tendency to discourses of state of exception.
        Mentioned in both of the readings is Patai's The Arab Mind, a text that formed the basis for these cultural assumptions, in turn leading into the formation of the Muslim subject perceived to be sexually repressed and prideful, which in turn helped develop the torture methods used by the soldiers in Abu Ghraib. The kind of violence targeted in this case, sexual violation, and the transparency of the crime help to project US culture and viewpoint on the Muslim subject. By declaring that this act was particularly atrocious due to the humiliation suffered by a "homosexual act", the US not only creates an all-encompassing structure of Muslim culture, but also positions itself as a nation that is more open-minded, more tolerant, and more "progressive" than its ethnic other. Similar to the case of the two men charged with rape of another boy when underage, the incident at Abu Ghraib is also being used as a vehicle for further propulsion on the subject of homosexuality in the US through its focus on the sexual crime. As various members of the LBGT community lament the negative light cast by this incident, Puar argues that the main atrocity, the corporeal torture of the prisoners, stays in the shadows.For this case to even receive media attention, it had to fit a certain criteria in line with the news' agenda. The US as occupying nation manages to turn a particularly heinous crime into a representation of itself as a "free" nation, diverting attention away from the normalization of corporeal torture. By condemning these acts as sexual violation, the US has secured itself as the moral upholder, home to those that are "truly free."

Week 12 - Puar & Long

Jasbir Puar - Homonationalism and Biopolitics

In this piece, Puar explains 'homonationalism' in relation to American exceptionalism and how it homonationalism is defined by race and class and is different from homonormativity. The term homonationalism is coined by Puar to note the sexual exception America has made towards it's citizens' sexuality as long as the homosexual citizens “complicit to heterosexual nationalism” (p.4). This complicity involves following a moral superiority discourse as well as “bio-political valorization of life and death” (11). Puar argues that the American exceptinalism to sexuality is specifically related to class since based on America's realization that homosexuality can still foster a consumer culture with aims to emulate the nuclear family. Puar supports her claims that American exceptionalism is also judged by race and gender by looking at the demographic that reflects “Dont Ask, Dont Tell” military policy that shows more men and women of women being closeted through this policy. (this is also supported in Scott Long's article). American homonormativity appears to be reserved for white middle class men. Homonationalism then becomes supportive of white secular norms that perpetuate the islamophobic ideas that tranform into “islam vs homosexuality”(p.19).

Puar looks at OutRage!, a European gay activist group, to show how muslim/gay binaries are produced. The convictions of these activists becomes saving or women and queers from islamic laws. Puar comments, “displays of solidarity with queers, often well-intentioned gestures of inclusion and acknowledgment of multicultual diversity, that may unwittingly replicate the very neocolonial assumptions OutRage! seeks to dislodge.” (p.19) Puar argues that it is the process of pointing the finger to islamic rule and reinstating that 'one is outside of them' that violence is perpetuated. (p24).

Scott Long also looks at a case OutRage! takes on as part of it's crusade to save homosexuals from islam. The case is the hanging of Makwan Mouloudzadeh for rape. OutRage! was lost in translation and saw sodomy as part of the headline assuming Makwan was being hanged for homosexuality. OutRage! and other gay activists ran with it and refused to acknowledge 'by force' in 'sodomy by force' that Makwan could have been a rapist to support then condemnation of religious homophobia. The Makwan story goes through a series of misinterpretations making Makwan a martyr for gay love. OutRage! Finally admits that there might have been a mistranslation but that the real problem is still muslim regime. Long criticizes techniques to gather information form radical gay activists because they make they silence and make invisible the real people in islamic culture. Long uncovers many problems with in these activist groups and explains how a victim begins to victimize, using their gayness to find solidarity with in other gays across cultures and 'veneer prejudice with respectability”.

This article was eyeopening, I was shocked to see how some gay activists work it's sad (and just shady). I like how Scoot Long summed it up:

“Their images continued being exploited when their wills were gone. What if they were ‘gay?’ What if it is true, what if all the frenetic speculation astonishingly corresponds to fact? Then they died for it, terribly and unjustly. But should that fragile connection then be turned into a vehicle for others’ ends, for promoting fear or engendering division or intimidating immigrants or selling the idea of a war?” (131)

- Hector

Week 11

In both of these articles by Najmabadi and El-Rouayheb all discuss the premodern views of “homosexuality” in Arab-Muslim society. But they take different point of views to show the effects of homosexuality in these societies such as premodern European society. They also talk about how sexuality in pre-nineteenth century had no specified gender in the Ottoman and Qajar Persia but also on the contrary of how there was a fix of homosexual orientation in these Islamic world.

 Najmabadi expresses the difference between Ghilman and hur and how commonly they were defined through the Qur’an verses and how it described pleasure and the understanding the beauty of male and female beauties. For instance, when it came to the males a beard was seen as the mark of manhood which was a transition from an object of desire to a desiring subject.  She elaborates on how there was still a need of how some man would shave off their beards to where they still would be desired by adult men.  She uses many definitions of homosexuality to translate Islamic/Muslim society’s pre European invasion on “homosexuality” and it was defined by “females segregated controlled, young/ and or effeminate males available for sexual penetration are tacitly accepted and very carefully ignored in Muslim societies in past and present.” So with Najmabadi focuses more on gender and with El-Rouayheb goes more on a historiographical point of view on “homosexual” and how there was more of an influence on the society through an imposed lens of a premodern Western society. By this it shows how Islamic religious scholars of this period were committed to show how sodimy was the most offensive sins man could commit. She continues to show how “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” was developed in the nineteenth century and how it overlaps with the concepts of “sodomite.”

Both of these authors give a great insight as to how homosexuality has transformed over the years and how the influence of modern Western societies have had an influential lens on the difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality in addition  they avoid to critique the normality of Muslim frenzied sexuality. It was great to read these articles because it also gave great insight as to how Western societies can have a great influence of how one might change the roles of gender in society base on their Orientalist views. As El-Rouayheb states “distinctions not captured by the concept of “homosexuality” were all-important from the perspective of the culture of the period.”  Which I find to be very true but I see sexuality is a topic a lot of people do not want to speak about.