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?