Re-Thinking Identity: I’d Totally Engage in Non-’Gay’ Same Sex Relations with Joseph Massad!
An ewz reader, currently based in the Middle East, sent us a very good response to an article written by sysh about Joseph Massad, Arab gay identity, and cultural relativism, and we’re reposting it here as a guest blog. Read it to the end, there’s a great line in the final paragraph about the liberation of all forms of sexuality.
Re-Thinking Identity: I’d Totally Engage in Non-’Gay’ Same Sex Relations with Joseph Massad!
I completely disagree with sysh’s post– it completely misreads Massad’s theory. What Massad is trying to do is attack the over simplified binary of homo- and hetero-sexuality that was birthed out of European modernization, specifically through modern psychology that invented ‘the homosexual’ as an attempt to cure and eradicate him/her. I know when using the word ‘invented’ people get upset but the fact of the matter is that until then, ‘homosexual’ as noun didn’t exist, and the idea of some authentic universal timeless homosexual identity is false.
Gay activists will have you believe you are born gay, but this is just not true. You are named gay once you show signs of effeminate behavior for a boy or butch behavior for a female, or you announce attraction to the same sex. This difference is huge. So you may be born with homosexual desire but you are most definitely not born ‘Gay’. Like all identities there is nothing authentic about it. Massad explains that and details Arab readings of homosexual behavior and acceptance of it in his book all without the use of a specific social category or identity.
In older Arab culture there was sexuality in all it’s perverse glory. A look into older social readings of sexual behavior, even if only through literature, is educational in the sense that it cements the notion that ‘homosexual’ as a social identity is in fact specific to a modern urban western culture and that the supposedly backward Arab culture accepted homoerotic behavior within the social sexual-gender identities that it had. Massad never says that it was some kind of haven for people who enjoy same sex sexual contact, he just said it allowed for them to enjoy this behavior without the stigma of being put into separate social categories, which now people can’t escape through homosexual/bisexual/gay/queer/fag sexual identity.
Massad never in his book or essays talks about an authentic Arab identity, what he’s saying is that sexual identities are culturally relative and that gay activists who want you to belive otherwise are lying. This is FACT and not theory.
For me the problem with Massad is that he refuses to acknowledge individual agency in this matter, since if ‘Gay’ is a culturally relative identity then one may choose to identify with it if he or she are from, say, an ‘Arab culture’, specially since western culture (for better or worse) is rapidly influencing daily life in this region, while European urban dynamics are slowly becoming the reality in some areas of the Arab world. Also, he completely misses the fact that it’s not only ‘Gay internationalists’ that are inventing homosexuals in the Arab world: modernity has been so incorporated by a number of institutions that this idea is slowly becoming institutionalized within the structure of the post-colonial state, and so that Arab states, through education systems, judiciary and police structures are adapting these social categories. And so citizens find themselves forced to deal with this language and battle within the structures of these social categories.
Although I will add my problem with some Arab gay rights activists here in Jordan who I find really idiotic. You hear them talking shit about wanting their ‘rights’, and I can’t help but notice that they see themselves so much within western eyes that they can’t escape this binary of homo-hetro. They see themselves as victims of heterosexuals, they don’t see themselves as sexual individuals within an oppressive culture that punishes all forms of sexuality, not just homosexuality, and a state that has no respect for personal privacy or freedom of speech, regardless of your sexual orientation. Within this structure it is dumb to fight for homosexuality separately, instead we need to fight for all forms of sexuality in the region.
January 14, 2010 No Comments
