On 7/28/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Well, you don't know anything about being queer or sexual culture in
>Iran or Oriental ism.
>
>You have to do your homework, first of all.
>
>Take a look at this article by Joseph Massad when you get a chance:
>
>Joseph Andoni Massad, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and
>the Arab World," Public Culture, Volume 14, Number 2, Spring 2002, pp.
>361-385
><http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/public_culture/v014/14.2massad.html>
>
>--
>Yoshie
How in the world do you end up lecturing me about Muslim attitudes about
homosexuality.
I'm queer, and you aren't. I've read a lot of queer studies, and you haven't.
I have spent enough time in Turkey to know that you have to
keep your homosexual identity a secret and Turkey is a lot more open than
Egypt or Iran.
Turkey is a lot more capitalistic and Westernized than anywhere else
in North Africa and West Asia. The more capitalistic and Westernized
a society is, and the larger bourgeois and petit-bourgeois a society
has, its sexual culture is closer to the Western model of thinking in
terms of homo/bi/hetero sexual identities.
And I am talking about secular Turkish society, not places
like Eastern Anatolia. It is a plain fact that YOU CANNOT BE OPENLY GAY
there. Mossad's article simply says that it is okay to be gay in places
like Egypt just as long as you are not open about it.
No, it doesn't. It raises a question: it is desirable to adopt the
Western capitalist model of homo/bi/hetero sexual identities and
demand equal rights based on that or is it better to seek to develop
sexual freedom without adopting such identities? That's essentially
Foucault's question.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
