• @Zerush
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    3 years ago

    People continue to be judged according to their appearance and outfit. In my life I have been much more scammed by people with an expensive suit, tie and watch, than by those with old leather jackets and full of tattoos and piercings.

  • @XiangMai@lemmygrad.ml
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    43 years ago

    Joseph Massad points this out that arabs used to be considered “decadent” in his book Desiring Arabs. Edward Said in “Orientalism” that the export of imperialism was identities. And as the West has come to attempt to universalise identities (LGBT its newest incarnation) we see how imperialism operates by exporting LGBT

    The flipside - whilst it’s exporting LGBT it exports homophobia in places where there was no LGBT identities and neither homophobia. So we see American fundamentalist Christians exporting to Kenya and Zimbabwe homophobia and imperialism reproducing the culture wars of the West to dampen class struggle and the combatting of imperialism

    Clip from an interview with him

    Joseph Massad (JM): The difficulty of speaking about a particular term like sexuality is on account of the ongoing Euro-American efforts to universalize it, and that in this particular Euro-American context there has been a need, nay a necessity, which has increased measurably since the 1970s, to consider it as always already a universal category. The point of my work is not to remind us that “sexuality” is experienced differently in different historical or geographical contexts, and that it has distinct “cultural” interpretations that shape it. Rather, what I insist on is that “sexuality” itself, as an epistemological and ontological category, is a product of specific Euro-American histories and social formations, that it is a Euro-American “cultural” category that is not universal or necessarily universalizable. Indeed, even when the category “sexuality” has traveled with European colonialism to non-European locales, its adoption in those contexts where it occurred was neither identical nor even necessarily symmetrical with its deployment in Europe and Euro-America.

    John D’Emilio argued many years ago that “gay men and lesbians have not always existed. Instead, they are a product of history, and have come into existence in a specific historical era…associated with the relations of capitalism.” We must add that this equally applies to heterosexual and straight men and women who also are a product of a specific historical era and that their historical emergence and production was also specific to those geographic regions of the world and those classes within them where a specific type of capital accumulation had occurred and where certain types of capitalist relations of production prevailed.

    As I argue in my forthcoming book Islam in Liberalism, as capitalism is the universalizing means of production and it has produced its own intimate forms and modes of framing capitalist relations, these forms and modes have not been institutionalized across national laws and economies, and in the quotidian and intimate practices of various peoples, in the same way. They have also not produced similar effects as they have in the United States and Western Europe. This does not mean that the hetero/homo binary was fully successful in normalizing Euro-American societies either, but, rather, that it set itself as the hegemonic form of organizing identities and continues to normalize populations in the West who resist it (by claiming that they suffer from internalized homophobia, false consciousness, and the like). The inability of the hetero-homo binary and its commensurate socio-sexual identities to institute themselves in the same way everywhere is also not unlike many other categories and products that travel with imperial capital from the metropole to the unevenly developed periphery, and are not always used or consumed in the same metropolitan way.

    The sexual order of the postcolonial context to which contemporary western sexual identities are introduced is already the effect of a colonial epistemology that has been translated and iterated earlier. As I chronicle in Desiring Arabs, the European shaming of non-Europeans on the basis of sexual desires and practices begins at the dawn of the colonial encounter, inciting a reactive discourse of assimilation into (and at time difference) from European norms. This means that the more recent imperial export of the homo-hetero binary—and specifically of gay and lesbian identities—takes place in a context that has already suffered a prior process of translation. This process produced particular “peripheral” understandings of normative and natural desires, inflected with western medical and scientific arguments and taxonomies, but which mostly failed to institute a replica of the western regime of sexuality.

    Mind you, I am not arguing that these sexual identities always fail to institute themselves inside or outside the West and that this failure is total, rather that they succeed and fail differentially across classes and countries depending on the effect of capitalist structures, and their production of certain lifestyles, forms, and modes of intimate life on different classes, which are in turn the outcome of uneven capitalist development. While imperial capital is often productive of new identities, including sexual identities commensurate with its dissemination of the heterosexual bourgeois nuclear family form globally, whatever new sexual identities it creates and generates in the periphery are not always or often mappable onto the homo-hetero binary. That Gay Internationalists seek to assimilate these identities by forcing them into the frame of the homo-hetero binary is itself a culturally imperialist symptom of imperial capital’s penetration of these countries, and not the outcome or effect of such penetration, since in most cases it was unable to reproduce or impose normative European sexual identities on the majority of the population. Here, we must bear in mind that, as Edward Said reminds us, “imperialism is the export of identity.” It operates in the register of producing non-Europe as other, and sometimes as almost the same as (or potentially the same as) Europe.

    D’Emilio sought to demonstrate that the effect of capitalism on the emergence of gay and lesbian identities in the West was both an outcome of labor relations that required new residential and migratory activities, the dissolution or weakening of kinship and family ties, and the development of a consumer society and the emergence of social networks that produce, shape, and articulate sexual desires that are commensurate with these changes, which led to the development of sexual identities. The extent to which crusading sexual identitarians have insisted on the presence of such identities in a number of countries in the periphery as proof of a parallel development of what happened in Europe and the United States, however, appeals to the subjective identifications of few elite members of these societies, and neglects the absence of economic and social structures that led to their emergence in the West.

    https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/28167

  • @blkpws
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    5 months ago

    deleted by creator