Blog Post Week 8

If last week’s assignment The Will Not To Know proves far too general/essentializing in its treatment of “Islamic homosexualities” across times and countries, this week’s reading provides more fine-grained studies of how individual states negotiated biopolitics during given historical periods. Joseph Suad’s work in particular interested me because of his search for “empirical foundations for comparative and theoretical endeavors” (176) in spite of the failings of works like the Murray and Roscoe. The “big point” that Suad makes is the different manifestation of biopolitics in Lebanon and Iraq, as part of a struggle between “primordial,” family-based politics (visible especially in Lebanon) and nationalist, unifying politics (as typical of Ba’thist Iraq). Suad makes the compelling point that Iraq deployed many more programs for interpolating nationalist subjectivity in Iraqi women than Lebanon managed in its confessionalist politics. However, I do wonder if Suad risks reducing politics here to a struggle between localist/patronage networks and centralized, national sentiment and bureaucracy. In the same way that depicting, for instance, European history as a straight, progressive line from feudal states to constitutionalist nation-states, I think a critical reading should look for the peculiarities of “primordial” politics in Lebanon and Iraq alongside this “nationalist vs. primordialist” dichotomy. In addition, I thought the absence of discussion about the Lebanese civil war or the Iraq-Iran war noteworthy. Finally, I can’t help mentioning how surreal it is to read about Iraq (and, to a lesser extent, Lebanon) before the wars that have occurred recently, which, I imagine, has changed these countries in big ways.

            I found Amar’s article on securitization very stimulating too, above all because of the vocabulary that he brings together there to talk about the nexus of biopolitics, nationalism, media studies, and postcolonial themes. Starting from a sketch of the Western media’s reception of Tahrir Square and the Egyptian Revolution, Amar describes the state of “hypervisibility,” the state of attention and regulation of colonized bodies, in Egypt, where the intervention of Western media and NGOs (quasi-private imperialism instead of the 19^th c.’s state-centered imperialism) puts pressure on the Orientalized “Arab street.” Western attempts to enforce progressive gender politics in that context taps into a delicate political balance between the Mubarak regime’s thugs and his opponents; the media’s take on the street, inevitably one site of pushback against the state, shames lower-class men seen as reactionary and sexually predatory, and whose hypervisibility pushes them to accede to accede to classist narratives of respectability. Amar, aware of the space documented by Mahmood for agentive adherence to these norms, demonstrates again the co-production (along Stoler’s lines) of race, gender, class, and sexuality in modern Egypt. The article, then, has definitely changed how I think about these topics by giving me a more critical vocabulary with which to talk about them. In addition, I found Amar’s article very pertinent to how we today must think our role as consumers of media in general, which serves in many cases to dismiss difficult ethical or representational difficulties. The Kony 2012  campaign provides a similar example of the media’s capacity for “hypervisibility” and the securitization of parahumans, even if its deficiencies have been intensely discussed, and its somewhat-tangential relation to Gender, Islam, and Sexuality. Kony and the LRA still provide excellent targets as People Who Are Not White Americans and whose problems might be fixed if only enough Westerners circulate their benevolence on Facebook. The problem, then, becomes one of pushing back against media that seeks to cut off and solve intractable issues of communication and representation.