---
To
synthesize what I was writing about in my memo and in the readings I believe
the main through-point of Monday’s readings centers around a contemporary
understanding of empire and its gendered relationships. At the risk of
restating myself I will briefly summarize each of the articles again. Cynthia Enloe,
Jasbir Puar, and Scott Long all write on contemporary situations that privilege
certain masculinities or sexualities over others in the context of the modern
American international relations. Cynthia Enloe in Updating the Gendered Empire looks at the way in which women are
used as a symbol by the American leadership to legitimize the invasions of
Afghanistan, yet the strategies employed complicate and contradict that message.
In Unbearable Witness: how Western
activists (mis)recognize sexuality in Iran, Scott Long writes about how young men in Iran who are
slated for execution become symbols devoid of their original context in the
eyes of certain queer activists in Europe and the United States. These young
men become symbols of the international gay-rights movement, which appropriates
their struggles and places it within the American-European paradigm of
sexuality, removing the context of alleged rape, and casting Iran as a sexually
backwards country. Jasbir Puar’s text, as an introduction, covers a much wider
area, yet it comes down to an understanding of biopolitics and necropolitics: who
decides who gets to live and die? Furthermore she unpacks the concept of
homonormativity, linked to hegemonic whiteness: in which queers are folded into
the ability to reproduce life. She asks whether queerness getting folded into
the mainstream means deferred death, or displacement of that death upon others
in other parts of the globe? All of these authors take a look at the ways in
which western narratives of sexuality reinforce and replicate the American
hegemonic system and dominance, in terms of sexual exceptionalism and practical
military dominance.
For
me one of the most fascinating pieces of Cynthia Enloe’s piece was the
beginning where she described a narrative of a meeting in Canada in which women
took on the roles and identities of women affected by American global military
presence all over the globe as a means to understand the presence of a NATO
base near to the location of the meeting. I will avoid restating the summary I
already made in the memo, but I believe this is a very useful and powerful way
of unpacking an issue. The first step to changing something is making the
presence of an unknown entity known. I a way I think that this is what Enloe
means by standing up—not necessarily new action by women (although not
excluding new action by women) but making the contributions and presence of
women in international relations understood and known. A telling piece in this
text is the presence of RAWA working within Iran prior to even the Taliban.
Scott
Long’s piece for me in complicated, although certainly more straightforward in
terms of content than the other two. While it is important to outline the
negative aspects of the response to Iranian capital punishment of young men, it
would also be wrong to ignore the fact that there are injustices perpetrated
upon young gay men in Iran. Long does avert this issue by acknowledging that
his organization does document these injustices within Iran and elsewhere, and
that here he is simply focusing on the media response. For me, I feel the
question that this piece raises then really is when is it ok to speak on
someone else’s behalf? For what reasons and in what circumstances can that be
appropriate? Long makes a very clear and compelling argument that queer
activists in Europe and the United States distorted the facts of the selected
cases in Iran in order to pursue their own agenda—however in what context can
one then speak out about the condemnation of homosexuality in other countries
(while avoiding the hypocrisy of injustices against non-mainstream sexualities
within the countries that the criticism originates from)?
I
first (attempted) to read Jasbir Puar’s book, Terrorist Assemblages, a bit over a year ago and I am still
struggling with the content to this day. However, I believe one of the most critical
formations in the book to come away with is the notion of homonormativity as a
link between race and sexualities. This concept has both local and global
implications—from the organization of resources in an American city, to
international political engagements. For example, within the United States Puar
asserts that the normative homosexual is then white, male, middle class—this person
has been sanctioned to live—the others have been excluded to die. This same
notion can be applied to a global scale, and Puar uses the example of the Abu
Ghraib incident as an example of how that might play out. For me, this concept
is the most important take away; that even within a marginalized group there
are certain forms that are privileged and sanctioned over others.
Hopefully
in class we can further unpack the question that Puar leaves us with regarding
whether or not the sanctioning of certain forms of homosexuality only defers
death, or displaces that death upon others in other parts of the globe.
No comments:
Post a Comment