Week 7 - Blog Post

This week’s first two readings seek to trouble what may be comfortable conceptualizations of sexuality – what Murray refers to as the sexual dyad of homo/heterosexual ways of being. The remaining readings, particularly Massad’s, focus on the occasion of sexual dualisms introduction to Arab society and its adoption by it.

Murray’s The Will Not to Know reveals the complexity of what most western-trained scholars would blanket under the term homosexuality. In order to appreciate the nuanced nature of these relationships Murray explains that we must understand that the hierarchies of gender and age that are crucial to the formation of these relationships (Murray, 32).  In his discussion of “Role Labels”, he suggests that the western scholar’s vocabulary is too impoverished to give accurate expression to the same sex relationships in Arab society, or name the people who participate in them. While we have a single word, homosexual, which casts participants in male-male sexual relationships in a single mold, “the Arabic language contains a huge vocabulary of gay erotic terminology, with dozens of words just to describe types of male prostitutes” (Murray, 28-9). Essential to Murray’s discussion, however, are not only the hierarchical relationships that governed and complicated these encounters, but the discretion that characterized them (Murray, 314). It was this covertness, this imperative to keep “acted-upon desires from challenging public norms” that I found particularly interesting, when examined alongside the work of Joseph Massad; Najmabadi eludes to these norms when she gives expression to the temptation of “cultural nativists” to render homosexuality external to the Arab world by (al)locating it in “the West” (Najmabadi, 19).

The politics of respectability, described by Massad, that surround sexuality in much of the Arab world provided an interesting lens through which to view the carrying out of same-sex relationships. As Europe began to assert its cultural superiority and its role as the barer of the banner of Enlightenment, Arab intellectuals and scholars began to unearth evidence that would challenge the Orientalist claims that placed Arabs low on the “civilizaional scale” (Massad, 5); Massad contends that the boundary between cultural refinement and sexual refinement (if one insists on such a boundary) is permeable. “Victorian notions of appropriate and shameful sexual behavior and its civilizational dimensions would rank high in the thinking of these Arab intellectuals” in light of the barbarism and primitiveness with which “degenerate” sexualities came to be associated (Massad, 15).

Framing many of the actions of the Arab political and intellectual classes as being beset by the task of “catching up with Europe”, Massad challenges us to think of sexual practices in the Arab world (in all of their vernacular expressions) as informed, in part, by the varied notions of modernity expressed through the ages.

It seemed at the conclusion of my reading that the intellectual and political elite occupy a space between, unique cultural practices and escapism that accords with notions of civilization and cultural propriety.