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?