Classical Values :: It's not homophobia if it's <i>Americaphobia!</i>

It's not homophobia if it's Americaphobia!

Can identity politics ever destroy identity politics?

Glenn Reynolds earlier linked a perfect example of the cannibalistic nature of identity politics:

According to Massad, a Palestinian Christian and disciple of the late Columbia professor Edward Said, the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an elaborate scheme hatched by activists in the West. Massad posited this thesis in a 2002 article, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," for the academic journal Public Culture, and he has expanded it into a book, Desiring Arabs, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. In it, he writes that such activists constitute the "Gay International" whose "discourse ... produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist." The "missionary tasks" of this worldwide conspiracy are part of a broader attempt to legitimize American and Israeli global conquest by undermining the very moral basis of Muslim societies, as the "Orientalist impulse ... continues to guide all branches of the human rights community." Massad's intellectual project is a not-so-tacit apology for the oppression of people who identify openly as homosexual. In so doing, he sides with Islamist regimes over Islamic liberals.

Of course, if a white Western man made a similar argument (as one did when he blamed Western homosexuality for Abu Ghraib), I don't think he'd be taken seriously, much less considered for a tenured faculty position at Columbia.

But because Massad's crackpot view of sexuality is in the tradition of the "anti-Orientalist" Edward Said, he must be taken seriously:

It becomes clear why Massad views gay-identifying Arab men with such scorn. In his mind, they have become willing victims of colonization. That's why Massad tacitly supports Middle Eastern governments' crackdown on organized gay political activity: He sees this repression as a legitimate expression of anti-colonialism. "It is not the same-sex sexual practices that are being repressed by the Egyptian police but rather the sociopolitical identification of these practices with the Western identity of gayness and the publicness that these gay-identified men seek." Thus, Arab gays (or, to use Massad's terminology, "so-called 'gays' ") should not identify as such, because to do so is accepting Western cultural hegemony. Massad even throws in a swipe at the "U.S.-based anti-Arab British Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya," a strong supporter of the Iraq war, for his alleged attempt to include protections in the new Iraqi constitution for homosexuals. How dare these men fight for their dignity as homosexuals!

It is true that the current understanding of "gay identity" is a relatively new concept, formed by Western thinkers over the past century years. This does not mean, however, as Massad contends, that a gay identity is inherently Western. The increasing acceptance of homosexuality as an acceptable way of life is a fruit of Western liberalism, but so is equality for women. Just because these notions originated in the West does not also mean that gays around the world do not also yearn for them or deserve them. But that is the logic of Joseph Massad.

His "logic" boils down to this: gay identity may be fine in the West, but when it is applied to the Mideast, it constitutes Western imperialism, because Islamic homosexuals are not "gay." Apparently he thinks there's a sort of a "Traditional Taboo Curtain" which must be upheld at all costs to prevent cultural hegemony from coming across from the West and corrupting otherwise clueless Mideast homosexuals into imagining that they might have a right to actually acknowledge doing what they want. (And if this means a few homos have to be killed, that's probably the West's fault too -- for "encouraging" them.) He says he's for sexual freedom, but I'm skeptical as he seems to be against intellectual freedom. Sure the gay identity is largely a Western construct. As I've often argued, the ancients didn't know gay from straight as they didn't think in those terms. But Massad seems to be arguing that people don't have a right to decide for themselves what they want to be. If they think they're gay, they're "corrupted" by the West.

Does this mean the executioners who put the rope around their neck are their cultural "betters"?

I suspect that what drives Massad is not homophobia, but what Dean Esmay calls Americaphobia:

Americaphobia: it's as real as Islamophobia, but too many Muslims are too stupid to recognize this reality.

Well, I guess I should be glad that Massad isn't arguing that the right to execute homosexuals is part of some identity group's "cultural DNA."

The crazier these things get, the more people just want to be left alone.

But sometimes, the right to be left alone requires a fight. I don't care whether the people Massad is talking about are "gay," or "homosexual," or "bisexual," or just men who for whatever reason like having occasional sex with men. The fact is, they are not free to do what they want to do. No amount of post-modernist analysis is going to change that ugly fact.

They are therefore going to look to the West, and to America. To argue against that constitutes religious bigotry, as well as Americaphobia.

Far from excusing the former, the latter only makes it worse.