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 21st 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).
I agree that these powerful generalizations made about the "Muslim/Arab Terrorist" and this focus on their only weakness being shame and weakness. It's amazing to me how such radical generalizations about a HUGE population were taken seriously to the point where Patai's book was circulated to military teams as a meas to prepare soldiers before deployment (1). Thinking about just the people in San Francisco I cannot think of anything we all have in common besides being in San Francisco. When you refered to "The violence of the United States as an exceptional event" (113). It made me think of the part of Qureshi's article in which he says by "blaming the victims' suffering on their culture, {it} deflects the scrutiny from the fact of their torture, and the cultural or political pathologies of those who carried it out" (2). In order to protect the exceptionalism of the United States, even when the acts are unfathomably cruel, some of the blame is dispelled onto the "homophobic/sexist/barbaric" Arab/Muslim culture. In order to deflect attention from the horrible actions of the United States military, negative generalizations about the innate behavior of Arabs and "culture talk" seemed to increase.
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