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Transatlantic Knowledge Politics of Sexuality
Abstract
Contestations over the rights of sexual minorities and gender-nonconforming people in Africa are profoundly shaped by two discourses that both emerge from polarized domestic political debates in the United States: a human rights–centered discourse of “LGBT*I” identity politics that promotes visibility and equal protections and privileges for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and intersex individuals; and a Christonormative “family values” agenda that promotes the heterosexual nuclear family as the foundation of civilization. Analysis considers these contemporary discourses in relation to entangled colonial constructions of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy used to justify the conquest and exploitation of Africa. This article takes particular interest in the power relations that are (re)constituted through these discourses so as to uncover the underlying interests at stake within them. Through consultation with critiques advanced within critical race and critical queer theory, and critical philosophical arguments on the epistemic dimensions of racialized, sexed, and gendered oppressions, it is argued that these discourses advance U.S. hegemonic interests and reinscribe Western hegemony. It is concluded that struggles for equality among sexual minorities and gender-nonconforming people must be approached as part-and-parcel of decolonial struggles to dismantle white supremacist and Western structures of oppression.
... Post-colonial amnesia can be seen in the omnipresent non-recognition of queer identity as a legitimate axis of human difference (Bajaha, 2015). It manifests through a constant (re)construction of queer identity as a "foreign" western import, a lifestyle choice, biologically unnatural, religiously demonic, culturally un-African, and a medical or psychopathological phenomenon (Msibi, 2012;Reygan and Lynette, 2014;Engh and Potgieter, 2015;McEwen, 2016;Owen, 2016). These constructions produce a social reality in which queer existence triggers anxiety, discomfort, anger and violence (Reygan and Lynette, 2014;Engh and Potgieter, 2015) and give impetus to eugenic convictions that queer bodies deserve prevention, cure and or extermination (Academy of Science of South Africa, 2015). ...
... These critical intellectuals provide research that proves plurality, complexity, continuities and discontinuities of gender and sexuality in pre-colonial Africa and elsewhere in the global South (Murray and Roscoe, 1998;Choudhuri, 2009;Miranda, 2010;Tamale, 2011;Morggensen, 2013;Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015;Lang, 2016;McEwen, 2016). The research covers histories of plural sexualities among the Negro people of Zanzibar, the Kikuyu in Kenya, the Mashoga, Mashoba and Magai in Easten African Coast homoerotism in West Africa and male lesbians and other queer nations in Hosia (Murray and Roscoe, 1998). ...
The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse the discourses of gender empowerment
in South African organisations to determine the extent to which they reify or resist the entrenched oppressive
gender binaries.
Design/methodology/approach – Multiple case studies design and critical discourse analysis were
employed to collect and analyse the data. Research entailed critical analysis of 36 published documents
containing information on gender and gender empowerment. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted
with six transformation managers as change agents who are tasked with the responsibility of driving gender
empowerment in the selected organisations.
Findings – The authors found that gender in studied organisations was insularly defined within the confines
of the male–female gender binaries. Consequently, designed gender empowerment strategies and ensuing
initiatives mainly focussed on promoting the inclusion of heterosexual women in and on protecting these
women from heterosexual men. Thus, gender empowerment systematised heteropatriachy in organisational
culture and processes while invisibilising and annihilating the possibility of existence of alternative genders
outside these naturalised binaries. Transformation managers, as change agents, fell short of acknowledging,
challenging and changing these entrenched ideologies of patriotic heterosexuality.
Research limitations/implications – The paper uses Galting’s (1960) and Paul Farmer’s (2009) concept
of structural violence and Rich’s (1980) notion of “deadly elasticity of heterosexual assumptions”, to theorise
these gender empowerment discourses as constituting and perpetuating violence against queer bodies
and subjectivities.
Practical implications – The paper recommends that corporates need to broaden their conceptions of
gender and to design and entrench gender discourses that promote gender justice and equality.
Social implications – This inquiry proves Joan Acker’s (2006) and Baker’s (2012) views that inequality and
injustice are produced and entrenched in a reciprocal relationship between society and the workplace.
Originality/value – This paper focusses on constructions of gender in organisations. By doing so, it links
the observed violence against women and gender binary non-conforming people in society with
organisational discourses of gender that perpetuate such violence instead of challenging and changing it so
that democracy can be realised for all.
Keywords Organizations, Diversity, Heteronormativity, Gender empowerment, Heteropatriachy
... According to the pro-family movement, international measures to address sex and gender based rights and reproductive health are part of a left-wing global effort to undermine the 'natural family', the sovereign realm of the state, and the future of Christianity ( Buss and Herman 2003, 57). Pro-family narratives about homosexuality as a form of population control are relevant to efforts to understand African rumours about homosexuality because of the increasing interconnectedness of these discursive formations (McEwen 2016). ...
This article examines the widespread notion that homosexuality is ‘unAfrican’ in relation to a historical contextual factor that has been widely neglected within efforts to situate and make sense of this widespread notion: the legacy of western population control interventions in Africa and the anxieties, fears and suspicions that they have provoked. The article discusses the relevance of population control history within efforts to understand emerging forms of intolerance towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ+) people across the continent. Western population control interventions initiated after the official demise of colonial governments have provided a historical basis for suspicions and rumours about how the West continues to manipulate and control African communities despite the formal termination of colonial rule. While positivist western epistemic frameworks have largely constructed such suspicions as ‘irrational’ and as barriers to its development agendas, critical approaches have argued that they can provide critical insights into social imaginaries, particularly in relation to dynamics of power and inequality. In interrogating the suspicion that homosexuality is ‘unAfrican’ from a critical perspective, analysis considers the rise of the international population movement and history of population control agendas in African countries in order to open up new ways of understanding the historical contextual factors that have engendered rumours that homosexualiy is a western imposition. Discussion specifically considers rumours and suspicions that homosexuality is a form of population control which have been iterated by African thought and political leaders. The article also relates these discourses to the increasing influence of the US pro-family movement in African sexual politics. Analysis draws on discursive data that was collected through online ethnography and fieldwork as well as a critical review of literature examining population control agendas and rumours in Africa. This article concludes that the history of the international population control movement is directly implicated within contemporary stigma and scapegoating of LGBTIQ+ people in Africa. The persistence of the suspicion that homosexuality is ‘unAfrican’ can therefore be explained, in part, through its genealogy within longer standing awareness of western efforts to contain population growth across the continent.
This article presents a multimodal critical discourse analysis of #GaysForTrump on Twitter as a discursive formation within Trumpism with distinct subject positions connected to specific acts of identification, libidinal investments, and a homonationalist allegiance to the United States, constructed as a homotopia for cisgender, white gay men. Trumpism is a political formation with its own discursive and structural dynamics that we argue have bred a specific strain of homonationalism worth unpacking in its specificity. Our main objective was to understand how identifying as gay was articulated as commensurate with Donald Trump’s particular brand of transgressive and masculinist white nationalism. We identified three overarching discursive strategies: the appropriation of the “coming out” narrative to validate the #GaysForTrump victimization experience; the construction of conservative gay masculinity as desirable; and the articulation of a sexual geopolitics that legitimates the extreme xenophobia of Trumpism.
This article introduces the concept of African same-sex sexualities and gender diversity which refers to variation pertinent to gender expressions and identities, sexual expression and sexual orientation. The article describes the emerging and evolving African scholarly production evident in the last two decades and explains key underlying themes that bring together this special issue.
In this article I identify some of the rhetorical strategies that help to explain how American ‘pro-family’ ideology has become so prolific in the global south and African contexts, despite the logic of coloniality that it reproduces. Three rhetorical strategies are analysed: The use of a rhetoric of ‘love’ in order to disguise an ideology of intolerance; The construction of hate speech as a form of ‘free speech’; and the positioning of the ‘natural family’ as congruent with imperatives of economic development and growth. The use of these rhetorical strategies, I argue, seeks to accomplish the objective of presenting pro-family agendas as benign, well meaning, and common-sense so as to obscure the forms of exclusion it promotes. This article considers texts sourced through network ethnography, online ethnography, and autoethnography at the World Congress of Families IX in order to understand the rhetorical strategies that the pro-family movement employs to bypass the colonial legacies in which it is embedded so as to gain allies in the formerly colonized world. These texts are analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis in combination with the critical ‘reading practice’ of Critical Diversity Literacy. This article also considers these rhetorical strategies in relation to the geo-political and historical contexts in which the Western concept of the nuclear family has been employed as a mechanism of colonization. Through this intersectional approach to contemporary pro-family discourses, this article concludes that this political agenda has implications not only for LGBTIQ people, but also for efforts to decolonize African societies.
Abstract
Despite slow pace of transformation in post-apartheid South Africa’s corporate sector,
the department of labour recently showcased some Johannesburg Stock Exchange listed
corporations for executing effective diversity strategies. The strategies and discourses of
diversity in these appraised corporations had not been studied scholarly, particularly from
a critical perspective.
This inquiry adopted a multiple case study design and the framework of critical diversity
literacy to study the nature, texture, and the depth of strategies and discourses of
diversity in three of these appraised corporations in the financial, retail, and private
healthcare sectors. Research entailed analysis of 35 published documents to examine
conceptual framing of diversity; indepth semi-structured interviews with 6 transformation
managers to explore prevailing organisational diversity culture and the designed
strategies to transform such dynamics; and focus groups with 32 employees from
dominant and subordinated groups to gauge the efficacy of executed strategies in
promoting equality and social justice.
The findings suggest that appraised corporations mainly complied with prescripts of
employment equity law and executed managerial instrumentalism oriented diversity
initiatives. Diversity conceptual frameworks regarded inequality, oppression and
dominance as historical legacies, rather than present day phenomena that are tied to
coloniality of power and being and reproduced through neoliberalism. Diversity initiatives
were minimalistic and impelled identity siloism, race and gender blindness,
medicalization and hyper-individualisation of disability, nurturing of white fragility, and
reproduction of gender binaries. Blacks, women, queer persons and persons with
disabilities were barely visible in positions of power, strategic influence and high income.
These subjugated groups constantly performed whiteness, normative masculinity, able�bodiedness and heteronormativity in order to fit in. This performance is systematised
under the guise of merit without recognising its dehumanising effects. The findings
suggest the inadequacy of employment equity legislation driven reform to produce real
equality as this law is a product of ILO’s neoliberal “Decent Work” rhetoric. The study
contributes to the closure of lacunae concerning paucity of agentic critical diversity
studies that examine effective organisational diversity discourses. The study accentuates
Theories of intersectionality have fundamentally transformed how feminists and critical race scholars understand the relationship between race and gender, but are often limited in their focus on contemporary experiences of interlocking oppressions. In The Specter of Sex, Sally L. Kitch explores the "back story" of intersectionality theory--the historical formation of the racial and gendered hierarchies that continue to structure U.S. culture today. Kitch uses a genealogical approach to explore how a world already divided by gender ideology became one simultaneously obsessed with judgmental ideas about race, starting in Europe and the English colonies in the late seventeenth century. Through an examination of religious, political, and scientific narratives, public policies and testimonies, laws, court cases, and newspaper accounts, The Specter of Sex provides a rare comparative study of the racial formation of five groups--American Indians, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and European whites--and reveals gendered patterns that have served white racial dominance and repeated themselves with variations over a two-hundred-year period.
Working with the recollections of everyday experiences of apartheid collected by the Apartheid Archives project, and drawing on the emerging theorization of ignorance in the critical philosophy of race, this article explores how an ‘ignorance contract’ – the tacit agreement to entertain ignorance – lies at the heart of a society structured in racial hierarchy. Unlike the conventional theorization of ignorance that regards ignorance as a matter of faulty individual cognition, or a collective absence of yet-to-be-acquired knowledge, ignorance is understood as a social achievement with strategic value. The apartheid narratives illustrate that for ignorance to function as social regulation, subjectivities must be formed that are appropriate performers of ignorance, disciplined in cognition, affect and ethics. Both white and black South Africans produced epistemologies of ignorance, although the terms of the contract were set by white society as the group with the dominant power.
This article traces not only some of the borrowings but also the differences between feminist and gay politics in the context of the post-1989 ‘multicultural debate’ and the hegemony of civilizational politics. This investigation is empirically grounded in one national context, that is, the Dutch case, which is exemplary when it comes to bringing politics of gender and sexuality to bear on national and cultural identity politics. The article recapitulates some insights on how feminist politics can get entangled with (neo)colonial and (neo)imperialist politics and traces these connections in a Dutch context. It goes on to review some of the forms homonationalism and homonostalgia take in the Netherlands. And it concludes with a discussion of the resemblances and differences between the ‘saving women’ and ‘saving gays’ narratives that inform civilizational modes of feminist and gay politics.
The article analyses the emergence of ‘homosexual’ organisations in Cameroon. Originating in a controversy over lists of public figures ‘presumed to be homosexual’ published in three newspapers in 2006, it explores the link between a critical political analysis of the concept of homosexuality and the emergence of the homosexual movement in Cameroon. Two main organisations, the Association pour la Défense des droits des homosexuels (the Association for the Defence of Homosexual Rights [ADEFHO]) and Alternatives-Cameroun, cover different areas of activity, one concerned with sexual rights and the other with sexual health. Their connectedness to the international systems in which such causes are categorised is analysed, and it is suggested that this connection operates as both a resource and a constraint. The role of the actors illustrates the political tensions at play: these include youth, organised collectively, who publicly reject homosexuality. The article sets out to give a critical analysis of the issues underlying this confrontation by demonstrating that it is also influenced by post-colonial tensions and their repercussions.
With sustained challenges to European rule in African and Asian colonies in the early 20th century, sexual prescriptions by class, race and gender became increasingly central to the politics of rule and subject to new forms of scrutiny by colonial states. Focusing on the Netherlands Indies and French Indochina, but drawing on other contexts, this article examines how the very categories of “colonizer” and “colonized” were increasingly secured through forms of sexual control which defined the common political interests of European colonials and the cultural investments by which they identified themselves. The metropolitan and colonial discourses on health, “racial degeneracy,” and social reform from this period reveal how sexual sanctions demarcated positions of power by enforcing middle-class conventions of respectability and thus the personal and public boundaries of race.[sexuality, race-thinking, hygiene, colonial cultures, Southeast Asia]
Offering a wide variety of philosophical approaches to the neglected philosophical problem of ignorance, this groundbreaking collection builds on Charles Mills's claim that racism involves an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance. Contributors explore how different forms of ignorance linked to race are produced and sustained and what role they play in promoting racism and white privilege. They argue that the ignorance that underpins racism is not a simple gap in knowledge, the accidental result of an epistemological oversight. In the case of racial oppression, ignorance often is actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation. But as these essays demonstrate, ignorance is not simply a tool of oppression wielded by the powerful. It can also be a strategy for survival, an important tool for people of color to wield against white privilege and white supremacy. The book concludes that understanding ignorance and the politics of such ignorance should be a key element of epistemological and social/political analyses, for it has the potential to reveal the role of power in the construction of what is known and provide a lens for the political values at work in knowledge practices.
In the last decade, the South African state has been transformed dramatically, but the stubborn, menacing geography of apartheid still stands in the way of that countryââ¬â¢s visions of change. Environmentally degraded old homelands still scar the rural geography of South Africa. Formerly segregated, now gated, neighborhoods still inhibit free movement. Hostels, Sexuality, and the Apartheid Legacy is a study of another such space, the converted ââ¬Åmaleââ¬? migrant worker hostel. Professor Glen Elder identifies hostels as sites of public and domestic violence, literal destruction and rebuilding, and as an important node in the spread of HIV/AIDS. Hostels have also become home to increasing numbers of ââ¬Åinvisibleââ¬? female residents. Finding that one way to understand hostel space is through womenââ¬â¢s experiences, Professor Elder turned to thirty black migrant women living in an East Rand hostel to map the everyday geographies of South Africaââ¬â¢s time of change. By following the lives of these women, Elder identifies spatialized forms of marginalization, impoverishment, infection, and disempowerment. But, as he points out, the womenââ¬â¢s survival strategies may provide signposts to the way out of apartheidââ¬â¢s malevolent geography. Hostels, Sexuality, and the Apartheid Legacy argues that the gendered geography of the migrant labor system developed in South Africa was premised upon sexual assumptions about men, women, and their bodies, and that feminist and queer analyses of space can inform public policy decisions.
The globalization of the world is, in the first place, the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and world capitalism as a Euro-centered colonial/modern world power. One of the foundations of that pattern of power was the social classification of the world population upon the base of the idea of race, a mental construct that expresses colonial experience and that pervades the most important dimensions of world power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. This article discusses some implications of that coloniality of power in Latin American history.
My essay is a meditation on David Marriott's corpus of writing. It attempts to foreground some of the implications of his work for the future direction of queer theory, feminism, and scholarly attention to race. In making a demand on our thinking and sensibilities, his contribution asks us to bear witness to past and ghostly forms of violence that seek to fix blackness as the ultimate signifier of unassimilable difference.
To be ‘politically queer’ at the beginning of the 1990s indicated opposition to the policing of identity and heteronormativity, and adherence to a politics that transcended liberal‐legal claims. More recently, queer activism and scholarship have largely focused on contesting the emergence of homonormative forms of nationalism and institutionalized rights‐based LGBT politics. However, to define a political intervention as queer on the condition that it explicitly adheres to one or other specific political project is possibly to overstate the case. The ‘queer signifier’ has travelled far beyond its local origins and, as a consequence, has shifted meanings in significant ways. In this essay, I consider current tensions concerning what it means to be politically queer, focusing on queer responses to the formation of sexual rights‐bearing subjects, and critically analyse the notion of sexual rights on which contemporary international mainstream sexual politics is based. Through this analysis I aim to draw attention to the entanglement of the normalization of sexual identities at a national level with current sexual neocolonial projects. Since the signifier ‘queer’ has spread in many different directions, I argue that it is precisely cultural translation that makes key alliances against both universalist and nationalist queer positions possible.
In this article, I engage with the intense fascination with National Basketball Association (NBA) basketball star Jeremy Lin and read Linsanity (as it has been dubbed by the North American media) as a flashpoint for a complex set of racialised histories and discourses. The illegibility of Lin as an Asian American athlete raises provocative questions about how racial logics and representations tend to rely on the visual as a site and set of metaphors. I then introduce the possibility of thinking about race, social intimacy and the Asian in terms of smell in an effort to complicate the way that we conceptualise race and imagine publics.
This article profiles homophobia as a form of hate speech in the African context by locating the issue of homophobia and hate speech primarily within the context of language and gender. The article draws on insights from language and gender, queer theory, discourse analysis and Foucauldian post-structuralism to offer a preliminary reading of homophobia as a form of hate speech. It seeks to provide a better understanding of homophobia by analysing the linguistic choices that speakers make in a particular context or situation; and to explain how the choices are intrinsically linked to issues of gender, language and power. Namibia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia and Egypt are used as primary examples, and data are drawn from media reports in both the print and electronic format. The conclusions show how homophobia and hate speech threaten democracy and human rights.
This study addresses the problem of sexuality and ideology in relation to (pan)-Africanist doctrines that have been instrumental in the effort of post-colonial African elites to constitute an exclusive African sexual selfhood. The focus is on their efforts to ‘Africanize’ the sexuality of the masses in a global context that dramatizes the uncontrolled flow of sexual desires, and favours the emergence of new forms of sexual expressions and practices that destabilize the post-colonial sexual order. The leading question informing this study is how a hegemonic heterosexual identity has come to be internalized in post-colonial Africa, and how both men and women have come to believe that to be ‘good’ citizens or ‘real’ Africans they have to become repressed subjects who not only limit their sexuality solely to heterosexual desires, but also have a natural aversion to other forms of sexuality such as same-sex relations. My main argument is that in most African countries, and specifically in Cameroon, both the edification of a phallocratico-patriarchal society and the political invention of the sublimated Muntu, the so-called libidinal African straight, went along with the suppression, annihilation or negation of gays and lesbians, generally misrepresented as deracinated Africans and dangerous ‘witch-others’.
Lay understanding and scientific accounts of
female sexuality and orgasm provide a fertile site for demonstrating
the importance of including epistemologies of ignorance within
feminist epistemologies. Ignorance is not a simple lack. It is often
constructed, maintained, and disseminated and is linked to issues of
cognitive authority, doubt, trust, silencing, and uncertainty. Studying
both feminist and nonfeminist understandings of female orgasm reveals
practices that suppress or erase bodies of knowledge concerning women's
sexual pleasures.
Over the past twenty years, regional and international efforts to secure formal protections for sexual minorities in the human rights framework have met with limited success. The prospects of these campaigns changed significantly in November 2006, when a group of activists, intellectuals, and policymakers met in Yogyakarta, Indonesia to draft a document that would outline the rights that sexual minorities enjoy as human persons under the protection of international law. Since then, activists and policymakers in local, national, and international forums have consistently invoked the Yogyakarta Principles as an authoritative document on the rights of sexual minorities worldwide, despite the fact that the document itself is not legally binding for any state or governing body. In this paper, I explore the entrenchment of sexual minorities as an at-risk group protected by human rights and the importance of the Yogyakarta Principles in advancing this “norm that dare not speak its name” on the global stage. I identify three reasons why the Principles have been quickly assimilated into policymaking: the modesty of their demands, the stability of their foundations, and the strategic, inventive ways that activists have framed and deployed them from multiple points of entry in the global system. In doing so, they have fostered a growing consensus that sexual minorities deserve protection, without necessarily creating or promoting the rights or formal protections that typically accompany such claims.
This article examines the processes of white racial identity formation in the United States via an examination of a white nationalist organization and a white antiracist organization. Findings indicate that the construction of white racial identity in both groups is based on the reproduction of various racist and essentialist ideologies. The realization that there is a shared 'groupness' to outwardly different white identities has the potential to destabilize the recent trend that over-emphasizes white heterogeneity at the expense of discussion of power, racism and discrimination. As a resolution to this analytic dilemma, this article advances a conceptual framework entitled 'hegemonic whiteness'. White identity formation is thereby understood as a cultural process in which (1) racist, reactionary and essentialist ideologies are used to demarcate inter-racial boundaries, and (2) performances of white racial identity that fail to meet those ideals are marginalized and stigmatized, thereby creating intra-racial distinctions within the category 'white'.
Homophobia is unAfrican as it undermines the rights of the sexual citizen in a way more reminiscent of colonial repression than post-independent freedom. VASU REDDY relates that discrimination has evoked special courts, states of emergency, terror and exclusion for homosexuals, allegedly in defence of ‘African’ patriarchies
Written by a renowned scholar of critical race theory, The Threat of Race explores how the concept of race has been historically produced and how it continues to be articulated, if often denied, in today's world. A major new study of race and racism by a renowned scholar of critical race theory. Explores how the concept of race has been historically produced and how it continues to be articulated - if often denied - in today's world. Argues that it is the neoliberal society that fuels new forms of racism. Surveys race dynamics throughout various regions of the world - from Western and Northern Europe, South Africa and Latin America, and from Israel and Palestine to the United States.
Social Text 20.3 (2002) 117-148
How are gender and sexuality central to the current "war on terrorism"? This question opens on to others: How are the technologies that are being developed to combat "terrorism" departures from or transformations of older technologies of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and nationalism? In what way do contemporary counterterrorism practices deploy these technologies, and how do these practices and technologies become the quotidian framework through which we are obliged to struggle, survive, and resist? Sexuality is central to the creation of a certain knowledge of terrorism, specifically that branch of strategic analysis that has entered the academic mainstream as "terrorism studies." This knowledge has a history that ties the image of the modern terrorist to a much older figure, the racial and sexual monsters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Further, the construction of the pathologized psyche of the terrorist-monster enables the practices of normalization, which in today's context often means an aggressive heterosexual patriotism.
As opposed to initial post-September 11 reactions, which focused narrowly on "the disappearance of women," we consider the question of gender justice and queer politics through broader frames of reference, all with multiple genealogies—indeed, as we hope to show, gender and sexuality produce both hypervisible icons and the ghosts that haunt the machines of war. Thus, we make two related arguments: (1) that the construct of the terrorist relies on a knowledge of sexual perversity (failed heterosexuality, Western notions of the psyche, and a certain queer monstrosity); and (2) that normalization invites an aggressive heterosexual patriotism that we can see, for example, in dominant media representations (for example, The West Wing), and in the organizing efforts of Sikh Americans in response to September 11 (the fetish of the "turbaned" Sikh man is crucial here). The forms of power now being deployed in the war on terrorism in fact draw on processes of quarantining a racialized and sexualized other, even as Western norms of the civilized subject provide the framework through which these very same others become subjects to be corrected. Our itinerary begins with an examination of Michel Foucault's figure of monstrosity as a member of the West's "abnormals," followed by a consideration of the uncanny return of the monster in the discourses of "terrorism studies." We then move to the relationship between these monstrous figures in contemporary forms of heteronormative patriotism. We conclude by offering readings of the terrorism episode of The West Wing and an analysis of South Asian and Sikh American community-based organizing in response to September 11.
To begin, let us consider the monster. Why, in what way, has monstrosity come to organize the discourse on terrorism? First, we could merely glance at the language used by the dominant media in its interested depictions of Islamic militancy. So, as an article in the New York Times points out, "Osama bin Laden, according to Fox News Channel anchors, analysts and correspondents, is 'a dirtbag,' 'a monster' overseeing a 'web of hate.' His followers in Al Qaeda are 'terror goons.' Taliban fighters are 'diabolical' and 'henchmen.'" Or, in another Web article, we read: "It is important to realize that the Taliban does not simply tolerate the presence of bin Laden and his terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. It is part and parcel of the same evil alliance. Al-Qa'ida and the Taliban are two different heads of the same monster, and they share the same fanatical obsession: imposing a strict and distorted brand of Islam on all Muslims and bringing death to all who oppose him."
In these invocations of terrorist-monsters an absolute morality separates good from a "shadowy evil." As if caught up in its own shadow dance with the anti-Western rhetoric of radical Islam, this discourse marks off a figure, Osama bin Laden, or a government, the Taliban, as the opposite of all that is just, human, and good. The terrorist-monster is pure evil and must be destroyed, according to this view. But does the monster have a mind? This begs another question: Do such figures and such representational strategies have a history? We suggest this language of...
I Spoke to the Author of Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill
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