While the premodern West attacked the Muslim world’s alleged sexual licentiousness, the modern West attacks its alleged repression of sexual freedoms.
- Joseph Massad
From the little reading I’ve done so far, it seems evident that there has been a persistent albeit shaky sex-positive vibe within the Muslim world that the West has never, and probably will never experience. Sexuality does not exist as a construct in the region, as sexual acts have never been likened to identity in any form. Because of this, West viewed this Orient as hypersexual, effeminate and chaotic during early colonial times.
In contemporary times, new concepts in the West developed through the shame and repression of the sex-negative West in the only way it could: identity marking. One couldn’t just sleep with people of the same sex, as it was so highly repressed that it demanded active secrecy and isolation. Based on this complete alienation, a separate culture and community developed, fermenting the discrepancy in identity between the purely constructed concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality. When it reached its breaking point, this once immoral community found methods to reassert itself within the straight world’s context, attempting to portray itself as patriotic, respectful, gender-normative, monogamous peoples. Gay marriage and military acceptance are currently the two most prominent paths to mistakenly ferment a semblance of acceptance/normalcy.
When the West views the Middle East from it’s ethnocentric vantage of identity-marking normalcy, it sees a world that refuses to embrace such markers of separation (or more generally any Western interference, but let’s not call it that let’s call it freedom). When the president of Iran says that there are no gay people in Iran, he doesn’t mean there’s no guys who don’t or don’t like to fuck other guys. He means there is no Western conception of sexuality, or really sexuality at all. Hell, they don’t even have words for it, even among the highly literate and intellectual. But all we see is repression despite viewing the same mindset within a region we’ve always debased and despised.
That’s not to say that the Middle East doesn’t nonetheless repress guy-on-guy action and relationships, but the nature of this oppression is a far cry from what is touted by the Western, particularly what Massad calls the Gay International, an internationally-minded body of LGBT groups and media that work to do what they believe is in the best interest of foreign peoples to bring about sexual equality.
To bring it in a theoretically queerer context, modern concepts of sexuality aren’t even liberating. Getting to call oneself gay simply reasserts that others are straight, that others are more proper. One is the minority, the other is the normalized (validated, entitled) majority. At this point, the minority is slowly being given the gift of tolerance/conformity (as close to comfort as you get in the West) through assimilating to heteronormative values (marriage) to create homonormativity. And when you try to bring these ideas to other cultures, the shit just gets messier. I don’t understand how the West can find it valid to actively impose our values on others, as if we are liberating them.
Our conditions of social structure didn’t come about solely out of activists battles. It’s foolish to think that the freedoms that minorities face today aren’t significantly available because of the ease of economic pressures that allow such diversity to exist. On this point alone it’s quite clear why bringing concept of postindustrial identity to pre- or simply industrial regions is unsustainable, beyond the fact that the cultures of these areas are incompatible with the tenets of Western sexual constructs. Whether it is in the Middle East of Africa, exporting these concepts create much more harm than good.
to be continued later…
