Week 9: Half-memo

Hey everybody. First off, since I’m going alone on this it’s just going to be a half-memo. It’s on the readings for Monday, so apologies that there’s not going to be a memo for the Wednesday readings! See you all soon.

The readings for Monday seek to extend a critical eye upon those who would speak on someone else’s behalf, and try to expose for what practical reasons one might be speaking on someone else’s behalf for. Enloe, Puar, and Long all write on contemporary situations that privilege certain masculinities or sexualities over others in the context of the modern American empire. Cynthia Enloe in Updating the Gendered Empire looks at the way in which women are used as a symbol by the American leadership to legitimate the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, yet the practical strategies employed in both wars complicate and contradict that message. Scott Long writes in Unbearable Witness: how Western activists (mis)recognize sexuality in Iran about how young men in Iran who are slated for execution also become symbols devoid of their original context. 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 topical area, yet it comes down to an understanding of biopolitics and necropolitics: who decides who gets to live and die? And furthermore she uncovers the concept of homonormativity as linked to hegemonic whiteness: which queers are folded into the ability to reproduce life—and does queerness getting folded into the mainstream mean 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, in terms of both sexual exceptionalism and practical military dominance.

Cynthia Enloe’s text, Updating the Gendered Empire begins with a fascinating account of a meeting in Canada in which women take on the roles and identities of women affected by American global military presence. The goal of this process was to help expose where women are within the concept of empire building, and what roles they play within it. This process exposes a mirror between the unequal gender relationship evident in the process of empire-building, and the unequal alliances between the American military and other powers across the world. These unequal relationships, then, are based on the dominant notions of femininity in comparison to masculinity. Enloe then moves to use this framework to unpack NATO’s actions in Afghanistan, concurrent with the dominant narrative that a major aim of the mission in Afghanistan was the liberation Muslim women. Enloe asks if the concern of women’s freedoms was central to the effort why then, from the beginning, did the United States support the Northern Alliance, a group whose policies regarding women are decidedly harsher than the Taliban’s? What ensued was a debate between the Northern Alliance and the “neckties” which were mostly male political leaders in Kabul in which women became a sort of symbol for modernity and progress. Despite the reduction of women to symbols by western narratives and debates within Afghanistan, Enloe wants to be clear that Afghani women did stand up and participate in a variety of ways in the shaping of a new Afghani government. Women directly participated in the creation of the new Afghani constitution which ensured equality between men and women—but at the heart of that very constitution is the ambiguity that some feel will arise due to the provision that Afghani law must be informed by the principles of Islam. All of these examples point toward the privileging of certain kinds of masculinity within the international political system. Without understanding the gendering of international affairs, it would be impossible to understand international affairs and how it is rendered through unequal power structures.

Scott Long’s piece is more straightforward than the other two articles I am writing about. Long looks critically at the way that different LGBTQ media outlets in Europe and the United States reacted to the execution of young men in Iran who were accused of homosexual rape. Long doesn’t seek to condone execution of anyone, but looks at the ways in which the response to these executions used them as a symbol to push toward an international agenda, rather than any attempt to understand the context in which the executions were carried out. Long outlines how western media outlets have crafted an Iranian war on homosexual youth as a means to pursue an agenda against the Iranian government, even though homosexuality is never mentioned in any other cases. By glossing over or completely ignoring the allegations of rape and imposing a narrative of American or European style homosexuality on to the young men that were executed it does a disservice to the very objective of the western writers. If the objective of the LGBTQ activists is to celebrate the potential that they died for trying to be true to themselves, then the imposition of a false narrative upon them contradicts that aim. The responses to these executions are full of contradictions, and Long even outlines how it may have even contributed to the hastening of the executions in certain instances.

The last piece I will try to cover is Jasbir Puar’s “Introduction: Homonationalism and Biopolitics” to Terrorist Assemblages. Since it is an introduction it covers a wide topical area meant to preface an entire book, so I will do my best to pull out what I believe to be there most important notions that she raises. First, the outlining of what biopolitics (the policy of sanctioning and allowing life and living to occur) and necropolitics (the policy of sanctioning death) are, and the linkage of race and sexuality. Key to the linkage of race and sexuality is the sexual exceptionalism of the United States over the rest of the world. This exceptionalism privileges dominant, white, heterosexuality. By linking race and sexuality it also becomes clear however, that certain forms of homosexuality are now becoming sanctioned and named. One of the core conceptions that Puar raises is the notion of not just heteronormativity, but homonormativity as well. By positioning a type of normative (white, male) gayness as acceptable within the United States, an otherwise subversive community can be folded into the sexual mainstream. Puar doesn’t mean to denigrate the struggle that the majority of LGBTQ people face within the United States, but sets up the question of why certain types of homosexualities are privileged over others. The dominance of gay marriage, for example, which is now the central issue of the gay rights movement in the United States and much of Europe, extends a heterosexual institution over the queer community and creates a type of sanctioned queer. At the heart of this exploration is the concept of empire—and the use of United States sexual exceptionalism as a means to both sanction and take away life. I am looking forward to further unpacking what all this means in class over the next week.

Quotations:

“… so many empire builders designed international power extension strategies based on particular ideas about where different sorts of women ‘naturally’ were meant to be. The imperial strategists may have been men, but they were men who thought (and worried) a lot about women,” (Enloe, 271).  

“The way that equality in marriage rights has superseded most other goals for gays in the USA (and much of Europe) eerily confirms Fraser’s point. In the USA, indeed, marriage has virtually eclipsed the struggle for national-level protections against discrimination in the workplace and other areas of life,” (Long, 128).

“Underscoring circuits of homosexual nationalism, I note that some homosexual subjects are complicit with heterosexual nationalist formation rather than inherently or automatically excluded from or opposed to them,” (Puar, 4).

On the ascendancy of whiteness: “what little acceptance liberal diversity proffers in the way of inclusion is highly mediated by huge realms of exclusion: the ethnic is usually straight, usually has access to material and cultural capital (both as a consumer and as an owner), and is in fact often male,” (Puar, 25).

Discussion Questions:

1.      How can queer rights be pursued in the United States without falling victim to the issues outlined by Puar in linking race and sexuality?

2.      Does any state have the authority to pursue international action against another state for perceived human rights issues?