Indiscretions: at the intersection of queer and postcolonial theory

258 Pages·2011·1.492 MB·English

by  Aydemir, Murat

Indiscretions
Thamyris/
Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race
Series Editor
Ernst van Alphen
Editorial Team
Isabel Hoving,Yasco Horsman,Esther Peeren,
Murat Aydemir
Indiscretions:
At the Intersection of Queer and
Postcolonial Theory
Editor
Murat Aydemir
Colophon
Design
Mart. Warmerdam, Haarlem, The Netherlands
www.warmerdamdesign.nl
Printing
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994,
Information and documentation – Paper for documents – Requirements for permanence”.
ISSN: 1570-7253
E-Book ISSN: 1879-5846
ISBN: 978-90-420-3187-6
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3188-3
© Editions Rodopi B.V.,Amsterdam – New York, NY 2011
Printed in The Netherlands
Mission Statement
Intersecting: Place,Sex,and Race
Intersectingis a series of edited volumes with a critical,interdisciplinary focus.
Intersecting’s mission is to rigorously bring into encounter the crucial insights of
black and ethnic studies,gender studies,and queer studies,and facilitate dialogue
and confrontations between them. Intersectingshares this focus with Thamyris,the
socially committed international journal that was established by Jan Best en Nanny
de Vries,in 1994,out of which Intersectinghas evolved. The sharpness and urgency
of these issues is our point of departure,and our title reflects our decision to work
on the cutting edge.
We envision these confrontations and dialogues through three recurring cate-
gories: place,sex,and race. To us they are three of the most decisive categories
that order society,locate power,and inflict pain and/or pleasure. Gender and class
will necessarily figure prominently in our engagement with the above. Race,for we
will keep analyzing this ugly,much-debated concept,instead of turning to more civil
concepts (ethnicity,culture) that do not address the full disgrace of racism. Sex,for
sexuality has to be addressed as an always-active social strategy of locating,control-
ling,and mobilizing people,and as an all-important,not necessarily obvious,cultural
practice. And place, for we agree with other cultural analysts that this is a most
productive framework for the analysis of situated identities and acts that allow us
to move beyond narrow identitarian theories.
The title of the book series points at what we, its editors, want to do: think
together. Our series will not satisfy itself with merely demonstrating the complexity of
our times,or with analyzing the shaping factors of that complexity. We know how to
theorize the intertwining of, for example, sexuality and race, but pushing these
intersections one step further is what we aim for: How can this complexity be under-
stood in practice? That is,in concrete forms of political agency,and the efforts of
self-reflexive,contextualized interpretation. How can different socially and theoreti-
cally relevant issues be thought together? And: how can scholars (of different back-
grounds) and activists think together,and realize productive alliances in a radical,
transnational community?
We invite proposals for edited volumes that take the issues that Intersecting
addresses seriously. These contributions should combine an activist-oriented per-
spective with intellectual rigor and theoretical insights,interdisciplinary and transna-
tional perspectives. The editors seek cultural criticism that is daring,invigorating and
self-reflexive; that shares our commitment to thinking together.
Contact us at [email protected].
Contents
9 Introduction: Indiscretions At the Sex/Culture Divide Murat Aydemir
31 Part One: Gay Holiday Cruises
33 Subaltern Looks and the Imperial Gaze: Charles Jeffrey Geiger
Warren Stoddard’s South Sea Idyls
53 The Orient of Critique: Ambivalence about the East in Merrill Cole
Wilde and Gide
75 Quempire: A Loiterly Journey into Heart of Darkness Jonathan Mitchell and
Michael O’Rourke
97 Pleasures of the Orient: Cadinot’s Maghreb as Jaap Kooijman
Gay Male Pornotopia
113 Part Two: Rearticulations of Sex/Race
115 The Double Nature of the Love Triangle: Sedgwick, Beth Kramer
Greene,Achebe
129 Of Passing and Other Cures: Arjan Ederveen’s Born in the Maaike Bleeker
Wrong Bodyand the Cultural Construction of Essentialism
143 The Refusal of Migrant Subjectivity: Queer Times and Rebecca Fine Romanow
Spaces in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia
161 Blood Brothers Murat Aydemir
183 Part Three: Queer Nations
185 Lesbian Representation and Postcolonial Allegory Anikó Imre
203 “Just to See”: Fanon,National Consciousness,and the Lindsey Green-Simms
Indiscreet Look in Post-Third Cinema
225 What can Queer Theory Learn from Feminism in India?: Nishant Shahani
Reversing Epistemological Frames
243 Weaving a Different Kind of Tartan: Musicality,Spectrality, Ryan D. Fong
and Kinship in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet
265 Contributors
269 Index
Thamyris/Intersecting No. 22 (2011) 9–30
Introduction:
Indiscretions At the
Sex/Culture Divide
Murat Aydemir
In the Netherlands,certain homosexual identities and lifestyles have gained recogni-
tion by the government, law, and media. Same-sex marriage—if we are to accept
that as a decisive benchmark—was legalized in 2001. A full appraisal of the possi-
bilities and limitations of that recognition is beyond the scope of this introductory
essay.1Yet,I want to point out that the qualified emancipation of lesbians and gays
in the country has accompanied, has been followed by or, in any case, has not
prevented the emergence of a new collective subject of discipline, power, and
knowledge: ‘Moroccan boys.’ Indeed,it does not require extensive exposure to Dutch
television,newspapers,and magazines to conclude that just about everyone is now
an expert on the tortured psychology, tribal loyalties, inherent criminality, religious
affectations, and sexual proclivities of young Moroccan men. Making up the third-
generation offspring of the so-called ‘guest workers’ recruited by Dutch corporations
in the 1970s,their appellation in political parlance presently ranges from “problem
youth” to “kutmarokkanen” (literally, “cunt-Moroccans”) to “Moroccan scum” to
“street terrorists.”2
I should perhaps caution that I assume no direct chronological or causal relation-
ship between the Dutch advances in lesbian and gay emancipation and this more
recent phenomenon; yet,neither do I want to foreclose the consideration of a possi-
ble surreptitious association between the two developments. That consideration is
especially urgent,I contend,because received wisdom now has it that the relation-
ship between Dutch gays and lesbians—because of our sexuality—and Moroccan
young men—because of theirculture or religion (read: race)—can only be antagonis-
tic to the extent that the needs,wants,rights,interests,desires,and claims of the
two groups can only ever be mutually exclusive. The cultivated conflict between Dutch
Introduction | 9
homosexuals and immigrant teens indicates a perceived rupture between interpella-
tions based on sex and those based on race,a rupture that is part of the very way
we think,experience,and live sex and race. In a different context,Jasbir K. Puar has
commented on the “perpetual fissuring of race from sexuality . . . the two dare not
converge” (126). Hence,like so many emphatic oppositions,this one,too,may dis-
simulate an inchoate co-identification that links the two groups together under a
shared discursive horizon. Its urgent consideration,furthermore,implicates the two
bodies of knowledge programmatically concerned with matters of sex and race:
queer and postcolonial studies,respectively.
In what follows,I first sketch the pertinence of Moroccan youth for contemporary
Dutch political culture. I try to demonstrate that their convoluted figuration exceeds
the conceptualizations and contextualizations that postcolonial and queer theory
each make available, forging their interrogation through each other’s frameworks.
Though queer and postcolonial theory generally criticize the sexual and racial
interpellation of the human subject, their establishment as academic fields also
inevitably expressesthe importance Western societies ascribe to the sexual or eth-
nic authentication of the individual. Moreover,since queer studies has primarily dealt
with Western sexuality while postcolonialism has largely concerned itself with non-
Western racialized alterity,the distinction between the two fields implies methodolo-
gical and thematic differences,entailing a division in labor and focus that might well
be innocent. At the same time,the distinction implicates and reiterates a large-scale
geographical distribution, which also happens to be an economic one. In this
respect,the institutionalization of queer theory and postcolonial studies as separate
fields that oversee largely distinct programs,journals,and careers resonates with
the apparent need to keep sex and race at some distance from each other: their
perpetual fissuring. Therefore,the work of the two fields is part of the ‘indiscreet’
scholarly critique this volume advocates,even as they are called upon to supply it
with its indispensable tools.
Subsequently,I revisit two frames that may be helpful for combining postcolonial
and queer studies and interrogating them through each other. The first comprises
the shared historical origin of strategies of racialization and sexualization,in what
Michèl Foucault termed the ‘biopolitics’ of modernity. Although the discourses of
race and sex engender separate ‘forms of life,’ their conjoined descent ensures
they can never be fully disarticulated from each other. Sex, race: always already
distinguished, yet never quite apart. My second framework entails the notion of
‘intersectionality,’ an early and contested attempt to navigate compounded or
crossed identifications. Finally, I introduce the present volume’s titular notion of
‘indiscretion’ as a heuristic sociopolitical and semiotic pointer that may help
counter the ‘discretionary power’ that insists on identifications that are not just
different,but incommensurable.
10 | Murat Aydemir
Thamyris/Intersecting No. 22 (2011) 9–30
Moroccan Boys
In August of 2005,I was alerted to a petition posted on the Internet condemning the
public hanging of Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni in the town of Mashhad,located
in Northern Iran. The two young men were reportedly executed for having sex with
each other or, alternately, for raping a thirteen-year-old boy.3 Nevertheless, the
petition alleged a definitive “sexual orientation” as the men’s “only crime.” Those
signing the appeal joined initiator Frank van Dalen, at that time the chair of the
C.O.C.,the oldest and largest lesbian and gay advocacy group in the Netherlands,in
calling on Western political leaders to send “a strong signal towards the Iranian
government.” The signal would include public condemnation,political and economic
sanctions,the granting of asylum to gay refugees from Iran,and/or the cessation of
ongoing negotiations between Iran and the European Union to establish an associa-
tive treaty. Though unequivocal,the response called for was couched in the relatively
genteel language of international relations—consisting of statements, sanctions,
and negotiations—so that it might have appealed to members of the Iranian govern-
ment and judiciary. That was not the case,however,for the stronger statement the
petition also included, which foreclosed the possibility of a political relationship
between the West and Iran.
The text urged,“These barbarian and medieval events have to stop immediately.”
The phraseology instantly disqualified Iranian politicians and judges as potential
partners in dialogue,relegating their existence to an irrelevant past and rendering
their speech inarticulate (the Greek etymology of “barbarian” refers to people who
talk incomprehensibly,uttering inarticulate sounds like “bar bar” or “blah blah”). The
contemporary international context that allows politicians of Western states to call
on their Iranian counterparts to forge agreements or to establish disagreements was
redistributed by the renewed dichotomy between the civilized and the barbarian,
the modern and the archaic,re-establishing linguistic and temporal boundaries no
appeal or signal could ever hope to cross. Indeed,the only agreement the petition
could now garner was between Western citizens and their representatives, to the
effect that Iranian justice is medieval and barbarian—a judgment that is easily
extended (because Iran’s theocracy is so often misunderstood as the very essence
of Islam,Islamic practice at its purest) to Islamic politics,culture,and law in general.
The petition’s terse and belated admission that “even the Iranian opposition”
(emphasis added) had condemned the hangings merely registered contemptuous
surprise.
The same Van Dalen who initiated the petition also manifested himself as a poli-
tical ally of the Dutch anti-immigration and anti-Islam politician Rita Verdonk.4
Verdonk served as Secretary of Immigration and Integration from 2003 to 2007.
Revealingly,she was installed at the Justice Department rather than the Ministry of
the Interior. Following the executions of Asgari and Marhoni, Verdonk, caught in a
Introduction | 11