Week 12

I am listening to the audiobook the Argonauts by Maggie Nelson right now in which she discusses the question of an individuals role in challenging heteronormativity. As a woman in a queer relationship, Nelson asks how wanting a family and love can both reify heteronormative ideals as well as disrupt them, and it is often unclear which is leading. She uses the example of a pregnancy, which she identifies as a radically intimate act that reimagines intimacy and identity through the body. And yet, is a pregnant woman still always participating in the sanctioned reproductive role for women? She also nods to the dilemma that straight people fret that queerness is dismantling society: marriage, family, love. And yet queer people fret that queerness as it is practiced will not be enough to break these systems down. This is where my mind was when I arrived at the Puar reading. Puar asks, in part, how queerness becomes sanitized so that it can reinforce national culture, and at times, heterosexuality. Another part of what Puar points to, however, is how queerness is racialized. I think what Nelson misses in part is how the seeming choice to participate or not participate in heteronormativity (or at least narrate choices in that way), may only be available to her because she is white. Muslim womanhood, especially motherhood, may already be queer in a way that it threatens the future that white America has envisioned for itself. Especially as Puar meditates on the question of giving and enfolding life on the last page, this example of pregnancy seems pertinent.

Week 11: Logic of likeness

A couple of months ago, I watched a BBC documentary called Wilders, Europe’s Most Dangerous Man?, which reviews the political life of the far-right wing party leader --Greet Wilders. His party, “The Party of Freedom” was established in 2006 in the Netherlands and is known for its vocal Islamophobic tropes against Muslim immigrant populations in Europe and generally for its promotion of the so called fundamental Islamic threat over the world. This movie follows Wilders’s election campaign and his ongoing trial for incitement of hate. The movie also sheds light on the short hatemongering movie that was written by Wilders in 2008 called Fitna. This movie encompasses Wilders’s ideology and some of the ideas circulating amongst far-right groups in Europe. In the movie Fitna verses from the Quran are cited with the objective of proving Islam is a threat, generalizing Muslim extremist discourse claiming it is shared by all Muslims and presenting Muslim immigration as a means of war. Furthermore, this movie shows pictures of hanged individuals that were supposedly punished for committing homosexual acts in Iran. These kinds of pictures are meant to present the treatment of homosexuals in Islam. As Scott Long suggests, the use of these kind of pictures in Fitna, is intended to create a form of Logic of Likeness on western viewers. Long claims that Wilders and the movement outrage! attempt to take advantage of the struggle against treatment of homosexuals in order to promote Islamophobia. 

Long’s criticism regarding the movie of Fitna has strengthened my opinion regarding whether it is necessary that movies such as Fitna be available for viewers online. This question was discussed by Emram Qureshi in his article "Misreading the Arab Mind" regarding the book of Patai, The Arab Mind. Qureshi cites a number of scholars regarding the benefits of using Patai’s book in academic circles. He examines weather citing Patai’s book can help refute his ideas or rather this proliferates them. I agree with statement of the article that it is better to use Patai’s work as a negative example of “anti-text”. Rather than disregard this type of literature, it is beneficial for students to learn how Patai’s book, like Fitna, is incredibly dangerous. 

 

Wilders, Europe’s Most Dangerous Man? part 1:

week 10/11

I watched the first half of A Jihad for Love. The early scene between the religious leader and Muslim gay self-help professional was really striking to me when he reinterprets the scene in Sodom and Gomorrah as a scene of rape. This moment is so crucial in condemning sexuality across the three major religions, I was surprised I had never heard this interpretation before, that perhaps the transgression was the violence and imposition of unwanted sex, not the gendering of the sex. The film also really personalized religion. The most emotionally wrenching part I think is the woman who is Iranian but comes to visit her girlfriend in Paris, but hopes to someday be relieved of her homosexuality through devotion. She even mentions making a pilgrimage as a way to stop feeling what she feels. I thought of my own Catholic upbringing and how sinning and guilt were personally processed. Within my family and the churches I attended, by and large, the belief was that many many things are condemned in the Bible, and many of them are agreed by church officials to be non-sensical. So long as you had faith in God, you would be saved, and avoiding sin was merely a way to communicate to others you were a believer and is the rational behavior if you do believe. Obviously, the people in the film relate to their religion differently and I think on of the large differences is highlighted in Mahmood's Politics of Piety and the role of self fashioning that she characterizes in Islam but not Christianity. And yet many of them also believed that if God is perfect, and he made me like this, I must be meant to be this way. I suppose more than anything, this film highlights the diversity of ways that gayness is experienced by Muslims in different places.

The film did seem to lean into the Massad's Gay International in some ways. It also heterosexualizes much of the Middle East by being filmed in large part in Paris, making Paris seem like the place that is safe for gays while the Middle East (Egypt and Iran are named) are hostile to gayness.

The counter to the Gay International is the idea that the "homosexual" identity was a historically specific idea that makes it difficult to compare sexual regimes across place and time. I was really drawn to page 19 where Najmabadi pushes Foucaudian thinking back. Most of the time, it seems like scholars take for granted that Foucault “got it right,” but Najmabadi argues that he did in someways, but his thinking about homosexuality also limits other modes of thinking. Specifically, saying that homosexuality is an identity category that emerged in a historically specific moment in the West makes it seem as though in other places and other times, same-sex acts and same-sex desire must have been divorced — since these times and places had not been exposed to the category of the homosexual. This push back I find really compelling but I also don’t know how to properly grapple with it. Should academics thus go hunt for the “existence” of a homosexual in premodern moments? This seems fraught because on our hunt we have to bring with us our preconceived notions of what we are looking for. Do we acknowledge that this identity likely existed in some form across history but allow it to rest at that? 

A Jihad for Love - Thinking of Intersectionality

I thoroughly enjoyed watching A Jihad for Love and gaining a better understanding of the struggles of trying to exist as a member of the LGBTQ+ community while being Muslim. As a proud believer in intersectionality and expressing every part of our identity as a culmination of ourselves, I was challenged by the consistent question presented in the documentary of whether or not one can be Muslim and gay/lesbian. This reminded me of a previous short video I had watched on YouTube titled "When will it be accepted to be Muslim and gay?" where a live audience and panel tackle the issue of homosexuality and Islam.

Link to Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05YuF73FRG8

Longer Version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6E2Q4INbmM

The biggest takeaway from these clips is that there while many may claim that there is a "mainstream", as described by one of the female audience members, take on homosexuality in Islam, there exists a lot of diversity of opinion and debate. Even when just discussing the issue of interpretation and modernity/liberalism in Islam, there is tension between people who believe that the Qur'an is to be read as-is and those who are willing to take more liberty to contextualize and reframe what is written. This connects to what A Jihad for Love touches on with the idea of ijtihad, translating to effort in English according to Britannica, which encourages the "right to exercise such original thinking:". I believe that ijtihad can be very beneficial for the Muslim community as a whole because I think it will challenge us to deconstruct patriarchal and heteronormative institutions within what is believed to be "mainstream" Islamic thought.

Even so, I think the Muslim community lacks general visibility of LGBTQ+ Muslims so I think in order to start the dialogue, the representation needs to exist. A Jihad for Love is an excellent example of uplifting these stories and struggles, but we also need to hear the stories of other LGBTQ+ Muslims in other careers/platforms. I think about people like Blair Imani who is a social media mogul of not just being a Black Muslim hijabi but also being Bisexual. Her presence alone can help to start the conversation of homosexuality and Islam by forcing the community to acknowledge the presence of LGBTQ+ Muslims.

However, I am not a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and visibility itself is a privilege that I take for granted because I can speak about my Muslim identity in a way that those who are LGBTQ+ may not be able to out of fear. As portrayed in A Jihad for Love, the mere act of coming out or actively being LGBTQ+ in Muslim countries can put the lives and families of people at risk. Just as there needs to be a conversation had on homosexuality and Islam, there also needs to be a Muslim community willing to listen.

Week 10 & 11: Mashrou Leila

The week’s reading and the movie Jihad for Love reminded me of the controversy regarding one of my favorite music bands – Mashrou Leila, a very popular Lebanese rock/indie band. I became familiar with this band after a friend of mine recommend their music. She also added, that this band not only produces great music, but also, protests for equal rights for the gay community in Lebanon. I found a unique musical and artistic group that creates great music (even for people that do not know a lot of Arabic or even none) and memorable video clips. I was also curios about the political side of the band that my friend told me about and read about the debates surrounding the content of their songs. In its very short life (created in 2008) the band had already had its fair share of political and religious controversies in the Middle East. The first and most known one is the band’s performance in Lebanon, where the lead singer, Hamed Sinno, waved the Rainbow Flag in front of the audience. This resulted in cancelation of several shows and music festivals featuring the band in Jordan and in Lebanon. These “controversies” made the band not only famous for its music, but also for being a symbol of a progressive political voice in the Middle East. Was that what the band wanted in the first place? In an interview, Hamed Sinno claims that he feels a burden, being portrayed as the sole voice of the Middle Eastern LGBTQ community. His biggest criticism is toward western media coverage that depicts the band as exceptional in its message – “It can’t be that absurd to the western imagination that there are many liberal Arabs inclined towards gender and sexual diversity.” 

Mashrou Leila Imm el Jacket live performance:

Western treatment of homosexuals in the Middle East is also criticized by Massad. Massad’s main criticism is pointed towards some western scholars and to the idea of “the international gay struggle”. As Massad argues, “the international gay struggle” is a notion that put gay men and women in one universal group that face the same problems. “The international gay struggle” is a political effort that divides the world to people how support gay rights and people who do not. The idea of the international gay struggle stems from an orientalist point of view that some male western scholars hold. According to them, the west possesses the knowledge of the problems that gay men and women face in Muslim countries and the solution that could help liberate the repressed gay community in Muslim countries. 

The struggle for achieving more rights in Muslim countries can be seen in the movie Jihad for love. This movie sheds light on stories of different gay Muslim men and women from all around the world that try to achieve acceptance for their sexual identity together with their Muslim identity. Their struggle exhibits the many different ways of protesting against the current treatment of Muslim gay communities. Their stories bolster the claim that Mashrou Leila is not an exceptional case.        

Link to the interview with the band - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jul/31/mashrou-leila-byblos-festival-concert-cancelled-after-pressure-from-christian-groups

Conflicting Masculinities

Yesterday, after I finished reading the Jacob’s study of Effendi Masculinity – a new species of masculinity that evolved out of an emerging bourgeois class in an attempt to create an indigenous modernity in Egypt – I get up to walk a bit and take a break. Naturally, under self-imposed quarantine, my options for where I can walk are somewhat limited, so I take to pacing the living room.

In any case, I find my father there and sit with him. For whatever reason, the conversation between us comes to my father’s brief time in the military, as part of the mandatory 2.5-year service required of all males in Syria. When he’s finished sharing, I ask why his parents hadn’t paid badal, a payment issued to the government to relieve males of their 2.5-year military duties. The option seemed like an obvious choice to me for anyone if funds were available. His response was that badal hadn’t existed at the time, and complained that even if there had been, his parents probably would have sent him anyway, so he could “become a man.”

To become a man. To undergo a process of turning into something else, something not necessarily who or what you are fundamentally.

I kind of like it when our language betrays the nature of how we might actually understand things. To “become” a man means that “man” is something created, fashioned by circumstance, certain features, signifiers, etc. This interpellated understanding of gender is a basis of gender theory, of course, so I am not gonna beat it over the head, but it was interesting to see how we always seem to implicitly recognize this. Even people who chose to rely on a bioessentialist view of gender will recognize it in the language they use since people “become” or are “made into” men. The moment reminded me of a song from one of my favorite movies as a child, Mulan (of course it would be a movie featuring a gender-bending heroine). Give it a listen. Sing along if you’d like, even. But it’s the title that’s what’s interesting here. The man training the troops tells his audience, “I’ll make a man out of you”. Turn these troops into men! In the army! Quite manly indeed, what with the physical bravado, honor and discipline it all entails.

The military as an agent in “creating the man” is somewhat similar to the formation of a modern-masculinity that we saw in Jacobs’ “Scouting, Freedom and Violence”, in which he discusses the first Egyptian boy’s scout as a “technology” used to create a modern masculinity. The other piece we read by Jacob, “Effending Masculinity” also examines the production of another modern masculinity, through the birth of a petit bourgeois Effendi class. This breed of “modern” man is rather different. Jacob explicitly notes how it seemed to diverge from the “warrior-hero” ideal of masculinity, which was even deified to an extent by the genealogical connection it was given to the prophet. This warrior masculinity did not disappear, as is evident in my father recounting his parent’s belief in the creation of a man through military service, or the song’s similar tilt. However, this category of “man” was different enough from the Effendi masculinity to warrant the creation of a new genealogy that connected the Effendi archetype to the prophet in order to legitimize its construction. And yet Effendi masculinity and warrior masculinity still coexist. The former did not replace the later, despite the former’s deviance from an existing narrative. And despite this deviance, both archetypes are still recognized as masculine.

What are the necessary-and-sufficient elements needed to create a masculinity in a “modern” country? Is it in the overlap of the warrior-hero and effendi, both of whom are providers and protectors with a disciplined demeanor? What ties a more archaic form of masculinity with the “modern” one, birthed in response to a very different set of conditions? I also wonder what “feminine” responses of postcolonial nations to exploitative world systems look like/could look like, seeing as how resistance is framed as a masculine enterprise. How do we move beyond the restrictions that this binary "masculine-feminin" axis present to begin with? 

P.S. Since I already brought up Mulan, it's interesting to read it in this longer tradition of female heroines earning respect and securing victory by perform masculinity. The movie then reverses this narrative and allows Mulan to be an "authentic" heroine, not a heroine in disguise. I think that by the end, the film does a pretty good job for a kid's movie at presenting a non-binaried resistance that isn't "fighting through masculinity" nor "through femininity" but I can't continue talking about the queerness of Mulan in this blog post as well. 

Maybe another one.

Week 9 - cultural threat

The engagement with the week’s readings reminded me of a study I came across before the break in another course I am taking this semester. A field experiment done in Germany was meant to test social norms and discrimination against immigrants. In this experiment, the researchers create a realistic “microenvironment” designed to observe the degree of assistance offered to women. Some of whom were supposed to fit the physical appearance of a “native” white German, and some were supposed to fit the physical appearance of Middle Eastern immigrants. The immigrant group in the experiment was divided to three different conditions. The first one was a non-white immigrant with no religious signs, the second was an immigrant with a cross and the third was an immigrant wearing a hijab. The results of this experiment provide evidence of non-statistically significant bias against immigrants and a strong statistical bias towards females wearing hijabs. As the study shows, the researchers argue that the “religious difference” between the natives and the immigrants is what promoted increased bias. Despite the many limitations in this type of experiment, reading the researcher’s argument for the first time made sense to me. As the hijab has religious connotation, it is plausible that religious difference is what drove the negative attitude towards women wearing a hijab in the experiment. But, after reading the piece by Louise Cainkar, I interpreted the results of this experiment in a different way. Cainkar argues that women wearing a hijab in a suburban area near Chicago were targeted after the events of 9/11 due to people seeing them as a cultural threat. She further explains that women wearing a hijab suffered more harassment than Muslim males because Arab Muslim men “did not live up to the stereotypes of being violent”. Though the experiment does not look at how "native" Germans treat male Middle Eastern immigrants, it provides reinforcement to Cainkar’s claim. 

In this experiment, the control group that consists of white and German speaking women are defined as native. The notion of native and nativism is explored by Cainkar as the motivation for aggression against women wearing a hijab. As she explains, in the United States, nativism is a collective fear and the zeal to destroy enemies of the “American way of life”. Profiling the group of white German speakers as “native” is a built-in misconception that makes it clear that the designers of the experiment hold. 

The aggression against women wearing a hijab by local mobs is part of a “culture war”. This figurative war led by people who believe that a hijab is a symbol of repression of women and thus represents the opposite of freedom. The notion of freedom also comes up in the text of Sima Shakhsari. As she points out, Canadian main-stream media focuses on the supposedly sexual revolution that is promoted by Iranian female bloggers living in western countries. As Shakhsari claims, though some of those bloggers write about a variety of issues, Canadian main-stream media seems to take a particular interest in anything related to their sexuality. When Iranian diaspora female bloggers write about sex, this is interpreted as expression of freedom and liberation. The effort of the media to represent these women as free relates to a western feminist idea that because these women are living in the western world, they enjoy more freedom than they would have enjoyed in a non-western country. The focus of media on the sexuality of women specifically also relates to the idea of femininity and its link with sexual expression. Shakhsari argues that sexual expression by women is wrongly interpreted as a feminine way of resistance- “The term, ‘sexual revolution’, as a form of resistance to the repressive Iranian ‘regime’”.       

Link to the research - https://www.pnas.org/content/116/33/16274