Abstract
This path-breaking collection explores how notions of the racially and sexually perverse are increasingly intertwined and contradictory. The 11 chapters are written by a wide array of scholar-activists whose diverse aims combine into a project that is both energizing and original. Part One (of four) explores how hegemonic nation-states’ ‘war on terror’ has been waged partly by characterizing Muslims as a civilizational race apart, one riven by misogyny and homophobia. In bodily and national contradistinction, the non-Muslim west is proclaimed as being co-extensive with freedom, evidence for this being the rights awarded the (white) woman and homosexual. To the extent that the latter is or feels enfranchised, the supremacy of the west is historically and materially renewed. Skipping to Part Four, we see how colorized others have discursively negotiated the racial privilege of western normative homosexuality. In some cases, elite post-colonial subjects cast the latter as a foil against which to assert the superiority of local sexual and social formations, or as a cosmopolitan ideal against which local provincialisms can be judged. In other instances, the label ‘queer’ is rejected since it absorbs, masks, and silences the denigratory racial conditions under which colorized non-heterosexual subjects operate. The last essay critiques theories of intersectionality that use the term to identify how social hierarchies reinforce and constitute one another, without interrogating whiteness’s investment in the hierarchies.
Part Two consists of three autobiographical works that explore how gay white privilege functions, blindly. In one case, an all-gay and largely white choir presumes that they fully apprehend lyrics written by persons of color, including those about racial strife because they, too, have been oppressed. In another case, a white lesbian is surprised to discover that her black friend and colleague experiences and perceives a white lesbian bar in Manchester differently than she did. Lastly, a German drag queen realizes that his attempts to destabilize notions of white beauty are doomed to fail, as long as his world of friends and audience members remain largely white. Part Three argues that visibility is key to broadening the social field. ‘Coming out’ depends on creating visual markers for difference.
The collection largely accomplishes its goal of ‘interrogating silences in queerness/raciality’ even though, sadly, there is no engagement with queer geography, with the notable exception of the opening chapter, written by geographer Jasbir Puar. Moreover, there is little theorizing of the larger political-economic structures through which queerness, gayness, homosexuality, and raciality have been mutually, historically, and geographically made. Such engagement would, on the one hand, allow us to explore how, when, where, and why certain symbolic and practical economies of sexuality and raciality are made, in the first place; and, on the other hand, to understand how and why Islamaphobia might be geopolitically instrumental in these oil-depleted times.