Week 9: Blog Post

This week's texts tackle the issue of western theorists and activists speaking on the behalf of Mulsim population and applying their own perceptions and agenda to local issues. They deconstruct the power structures that create either a gender and race biased perception that tend to exclude rather than addressing genuine issues.

Cynthia Enloe , in her article "Updating the gendered empire", explains how the history of empires as it has been told for a long time focusses on parameters as "battlefields", "diplomatic halls", fields that exclude a priori the women's part in the creation of empire. In this text Cynthia Enloe shows how the women's experience have influenced the construction of empire based on the recent example of the US-empire during the Iraq/ Afghanistan-invasions. The author then moves to a subject that Lila Abu-Lughod's text argued on in her article "Do muslim women really need saving", the claim that one of the goal of the mission in Afghanistan was the liberation of muslim women from sexist and archaic practices. As Lila Abu-Lughod, Enloe finally makes the argument that these women can and have talked for themselves, that Afghan activist women exist and took part in unformed political forum. She deconstructs the vision we have of politics as being solely masculine and public while she explains that private place as beauty parlor can be part of the political sphere. In fact, international politics are seen as intrinsically gendered and masculine and the true understanding of these dynamics can only be reached if we pay attention to the women's experience. Paying attention to this gendered international political system is thus the only way to overcome unequal power "arrangements".

Jasbir Puar's "Introduction : homonationalism and biopolitic" focusses on the effects of the construction of an "homonationalism", a national "homosexual norms, on sexual objects (queerness, gayness, but also race), anchored in the American exceptionalism and universality. By claiming uniqueness and universality on homonationalism seen as male, white and middle-class, this norm excludes numbers of people that don't belong to this category. Even in the homosexual category, a group that is struggling to define itself in regard to the heterosexual norm, power structures bad on race and gender play a major part in defying what is assumed as being the norm, what is sanctioned  and what is not, who's supposed to live and who is not. American exception frames the reading of Muslim sexualities and seen Muslim populations as a threat to Lesbian and Gay movements. The author also shows how this exeptionalism represents a harm for queerness.

Scott Long's text gives a very interesting analysis of how the western gay and western community has interpreted the execution of Makwan accused of rape in Iran. In his article, the author shows how LGBTQ have reduced this execution to gay issues, applying to this specific context an ethnocentric perception and thus reducing the scope of right violation to homophobia. According to the author, these executions then become symbols for the western gay and lesbian category that allow them to apply their own agenda rather than tackling this issue in its context. The author also underlines that, even after their death, the symbol of the two young men executed was still used as a weapon to fight against homophobia, not taking into account their will and the real struggle they were engaged in.