Week 9 Blog Post

The theme that I found to be dominant in the readings was one of a privileged masculinity—one that was used to promote heteronormative, white standards and privileges. Because “othered” groups—ethnic minority groups, militarily oppressed peoples, sexual minorities—desire to share in these privileges, they take on certain characteristics of this heteronormative whiteness. Specifically, they attempt to identify with one aspect of the dominant masculinity by repressing those who do not fit into this category.

In “Updating the Gendered Empire, Cynthia Enloe shows that the Iraqi groups that gained power and acceptance from U.S. occupiers did not place women’s advancement as their top goals, and in fact remained resistant to women’s demands for rights.  Despite this attempt to identify with the super-masculinized occupying forces, the “unequal alliances” resulted in unequal masculinities.

In “Unbearable Witness,” Long cites the “politics of provocation practiced against European Muslims” (Long 130) as an example of how the gay community has othered the Muslim community, especially Muslim queers. He questions the unity of the gay community itself when it relies so heavily on a strict identity-based politics, in which recognition of an identity is placed as the highest priority, and “cultural domination” is seen as the enemy (Long 128). With such strictures on membership in this community, it is difficult to apply a theme of universality, and therefore justify ‘liberating’ actions.

Western movements of “gay liberation and emancipation” are seen in Puar’s “Introduction” as having created “narratives about greater homophobia in immigrant communities and communities of color” (Puar 22). In contrast, ethnic communities “aid the project of whiteness” by practicing economic privileges “which fraction [them] away from racial alliances” (Puar 31). 

            Because the project of white ascendancy has been able to pit all of these groups against each other, none has succeeded in fully assimilating, and no group has achieved an equal masculinity with the heteronormative white male.