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Roundtable
Queer Theory and Middle East Studies
In my 2007 monograph Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (hereafter TA), I develop the conceptual frame of "homonationalism" for understanding the complexities of how "acceptance" and "tolerance" for gay and lesbian subjects have become a barometer by which the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated.1I had become increasingly frustrated with the standard refrain of transnational feminist discourse as well as queer theories that unequivocally stated, quite vociferously throughout the 1990s, that the nation is heteronormative and that the queer is inherently an outlaw to the nation-state. While the discourse of American exceptionalism has always served a vital role in U.S. nation-state formation, TA examines how sexuality has become a crucial formation in the articulation of proper U.S. citizens across other registers like gender, class, and race, both nationally and transnationally. In this sense, homonationalism is an analytic category deployed to understand and historicize how and why a nation's status as "gay-friendly" has become desirable in the first place. Like modernity, homonationalism can be resisted and re-signified, but not opted out of: we are all conditioned by it and through it.
In TA, for instance, I critically interrogate LGBTQ activist responses to the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Lawrence, which decriminalized sodomy between consenting adults acting in private, bringing into relief how the celebration of the queer liberal subject as bearer of privacy rights and economic freedom sanctions a regime of racialized surveillance, detention, and deportation. TA shows how homonationalism goes global, moreover, as it undergirds U.S. imperial structures through an embrace of a sexually progressive multiculturalism justifying foreign intervention. For example, both the justifications and the admonishments provoked by the Abu Ghraib photos rely on Orientalist constructions of Muslim male sexuality as simultaneously excessively queer and dangerously premodern. The discursive field produced around Abu Ghraib enlists homonormative U.S. subjects in the defense of "democratic" occupation.
It has been humbling and also very interesting to see the ways homonationalism as a concept has been deployed, adapted, rearticulated, and critiqued in various national, activist, and academic contexts; giving rise to generative and constructive debate was my true intent in writing the book, which...