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Anjali Arondekar: Border/Linesex
Anjali Arondekar: Border/Linesex
Anjali Arondekar
University of California, Santa Cruz
................
race This article foregrounds the current critical emphasis on the language of
intersectionality and analogy between race and sexuality, especially with respect
queer to the discourse of rights and discrimination. Such language uses ‘racism’ and
‘race’ as stable registers of oppression, whereby a range of discriminatory
analogy
practices based on sexual orientation gather representational and judicial validity
sexuality through their linkage and similarity to such registers. Buried in such ‘linkages’ is
the very mathematical paradox of parallelism that forecloses any true intersec-
transnationalism tion, even as it invites lines of common origin and travel. Hence, we are often left
with a language of analogy and repetition where race as sex and sex as race
rights become parallel political formations only through a constant reminder of their
................ irreconcilable separation. Instead, I theorize the productive possibility of a
Spivakian ‘transactional reading’ whereby the linking of sex and race becomes a
1 The first
dynamic dilation of difference, even as it speaks the language of similarity and
incarnation of this
piece was given as a kinship. Some of the questions I raise are: Are such analogical invocations of
talk at the inaugural sexuality also about new forms of racisms and imperialisms? Given the rise of
conference of the queer transnational work, how do we translate the analytical paradigm of ‘race’
Center for Sexual
Cultures at the outside of its formations in the United States? In order to answer these questions
University of and more, I turn to contemporary mobilizations of the race/sex nexus, especially
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interventions Vol. 7(2) 236 !/250 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)
Copyright # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080/13698010500146781
BORDE R/L INE S EX
Anjali Arondekar
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California at post the events of 9/11. I focus, in particular, on the successful emergence of
Berkeley, 8 March queer ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ groups such as Al-Fatiha post 9/11, and situate their
2002.
success within a critique of American mobilizations of religion, race and
sexuality.
2 Quoted here is a The compulsion to translate, to think the world in the categories of the Euro
transmuted citation. imperial modern is real and deeply rooted in institutional practices. One cannot
Geeta Patel rewrites simply opt out of this problem, or [one cannot simply] not suffer by a sheer act of
Dipesh Chakraborty,
will, the epistemic violence that is necessary to nation and empire making
‘The difference-
differal of a colonial drives. . . . I think of it as Barthes once said with reference to Shaharazad of the
modernity: Public Arabian Nights, more as a merchandise, a narrative traded for one more day of
debates on
life. . . . It is to say to every perpetrator of epistemic violence and in the voice of the
domesticity in British
India’, Subaltern woman subject Shaharazad: don’t fuck me yet, for I still have another story to tell.
Studies VIII (1994): (Patel 1998)2
50 !/88.
Chakraborty,
himself, is rewriting Necessarily, we must dismiss those tendencies that encourage the consoling play of
Roland Barthes. recognitions. (Foucault 1977)
Tr a n s a c t i n g s e x
Al-Fatiha follows in the footsteps of GLAS (Gay and Lesbian Arabic [sic]
Society), founded in 1989, to help gay Muslims be ‘part of the global gay and
lesbian movement’ (quoted in Massad 2002). Both organizations clearly
articulate their links to some avatar of global queer solidarity, albeit based
on what they outline is their corrective view of Islamic ideology and heritage.
The critical impulse, especially behind the mission statement of Al-Fatiha, is
that the organization merely seeks to explicate, make ‘right’ what is misread,
‘wrong’ in fundamentalist and Western readings of Islam. Joseph Massad, in
his work on the linkages between the Gay International and the Arab World,
in t e r v e n t i o n s ! 7: 2
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/ 242
argues that Al-Fatiha’s gestures of ideological reform vis à vis Islam merely
echo the missionary zeal embedded in the rhetoric of organizations such as
ILGHRC and ILGA (International Lesbian and Gay Association). For
Massad, just as Muslims within pre-modern Western articulations were
attacked for their sexual licentiousness, the modern West now reorders that
attack on the grounds of Islam’s alleged repression of sexual freedoms.
Organizations such as Al-Fatiha thus merely continue the hegemony of the
sexual epistemology of identity over practice, so necessary to the establish-
ment of an identity-based global queer movement emanating from the West.
Since its inception in November 1997, Al-Fatiha has also received
extensive publicity in major queer-friendly and queer-focused newspapers
and magazines in North America and Europe, ranging from The Advocate ,
Trikone magazine, The Gay Times (UK) and The New York Times, to name
a select few. The Al-Fatiha website also proudly (and indiscriminately)
proclaims its coverage in a range of non-Western media sites in Bangladesh,
Turkey and India, underlining through such claims that its membership is
growing and spreading globally. The website does not describe the particular
discursive locations of this much-touted coverage in Bangladesh and/or
India, for instance, disavowing, as it were, any sites of local challenge. In
fact, Al-Fatiha has been heavily criticized by the main grassroots lesbian
rights group, Stree Sangam, in Mumbai, India, for producing ‘dangerously
communal rhetoric’ around essential religious identities (Shah 2001). In a
metropolitan space like Mumbai, India, which has still not entirely recovered
from the Hindu-right’s hysterical denouncements of a lesbian relationship
depicted in Deepa Mehta’s Fire , Al-Fatiha’s mission, however tolerantly
imagined, still comes up short. By claiming to speak for all Muslims, and in
the name of a corrective Islam, Al-Fatiha produces merely another equally
flattening order of things, delinking geopolitical landscapes from the
racialization and sexualization of bodies. Arab Muslims stand in for South
Asian Muslims and so on, producing the symbolic corpus of gay Muslim
identity that continuously overlooks its own geographical and historical
fractures.
A dangerous effect of such elisions of differences within and between what
is articulated as ‘Muslim’, ‘gay’, ‘queer’, ‘Arab’, ‘South Asian’ can be most
markedly seen in the responses of public cultures after the events of 9/11. In
the weeks following the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, media
and activist groups recorded the increasing proliferation of hate-crimes
against Arab-Americans, Sikhs and various ‘others’ who come under the
purview of difference (‘mistaken identity’) as broadly conceived and
stretched within gender and racial terms. In the aftermath of 9/11, the
consolation of a racially motivated crime replaces the specter of gay bashing
in a proudly liberal urban space such as San Francisco. Hence, in San
Francisco, for example, a Latino gay man was reportedly beaten up for
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branch of Al-Fatiha, and portrays him as the selfless new hero of secular
Muslims, and by extension of the secular West. Adnan Ali, in response to a
question on the relationship of gay Muslims to the larger (read: white)
community, answers: ‘There’s a lot of Islamophobia, to them [gay Muslims],
everyone is like the Taliban.’ Here, the confusions of communalism, bigotry
and terrorism collude to produce the gay Muslim as the modern revolu-
tionary, fighting against the absolutism of competing systems of intolerant
whiteness and Islamic fundamentalism. And in case the reader becomes too
disturbed by this image, the author, Tania Branigan, coyly adds that Ali is
‘clean-shaven’ and gentle as he thoughtfully strokes his hairless chin in
response to her questions. In this case, fags, Al-Fatiha’s gay Muslim subjects
become the new purveyors of Western democracy, the Bin-Ladenesque
Islamic revolutionaries domesticated to clean-shaven, secular subjects of the
Union Jack (Branigan 2001).
Even as faith-based queer organizations like Al-Fatiha placate American
liberal sentiment, there are others who continue to join the fray, in louder
and more visible form. The heavily orchestrated publication of Irshad
Manji’s The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in her Faith
(Manji 2003) in the United States and Canada is one such striking example.
Manji, a self-designated ‘Muslim refusnik’ is a prominent lesbian talk-show
host in Canada who claims she wrote the book because ‘Islam is on very thin
ice with me’ (Manji 2003: 1). Manji argues for an Islamic reformation,
substituting jihad , or religious war, with ijtihad , independent critical
thinking for Muslims. And of course, it is no small coincidence that such
reform can only take place in countries such as the United States where
Muslims are wildly free from the suffocating totalitarianism of the Islamic
world (Manji 2003: 2 !/24). Under Manji’s ‘Western eyes’, to slightly
misquote Chandra Talpade-Mohanty here, globalization is the new freedom.
As she glibly writes: ‘Maybe in your steely-eyed revolt against globaliza-
tion . . . you’ve concluded that the universality of freedom is a slick
euphemism for the uniformity of culture. Get real. Under globalization’s
‘‘uniformity,’’ nobody forces me on pain of execution to patronize the
golden arches. I can choose not to read a McDonald’s menu’’ (Manji 2003:
202).
While there is much to be said about the problematic and dangerous
success of Manji’s book in the United States and Canada, I want to restrict
my comments here to the strategic mobilization of her ‘Muslim queer’
identity. Manji’s website (www.irshadmanji.com) carefully documents the
transnational reach of her book !/ the book has been published in over ten
countries !/ and contains links to free downloadable Urdu and Arabic
translations of the text. We are told that bookstores in Pakistan, for
example, are afraid to sell the book, and Manji’s American-based website,
with its free Arabic and Urdu translations, is designed to make such material
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Thus far, I have outlined some symptomatic debates through which the facile
(and sometimes not so facile) conflations of race and sex produce gross
misrepresentations of historical and geopolitical subjects and issues. What I
want to do now is to provide some examples of critical work where the
epistemic violence of such analogical gestures is being interrogated and
negotiated. One such intellectual space of intervention is the burgeoning
arena of critical queer/race studies in the United States. Critical queer/race
studies, broadly defined, explores the interrelated, epistemological frame-
works of critical race studies and queer studies. Through the study of a range
of philosophical, scientific, literary and cinematic texts, to name a select few,
it rigorously historicizes and theorizes nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-
first-century efforts to simultaneously link and separate theories of race and
sexuality. Overall, this is an interdisciplinary field, where the interstices
between ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ materials on sexuality and race are
constantly exploded and expanded upon. Building on the work of critical
race studies scholars like Kimberle Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Kendall
Thomas and Patricia Williams, critical queer/race studies extends interroga-
tions of intersectionality and legal interpretation to questions of sexuality
and race, as they emerge both in equal rights discourse, as well as the
intellectual space of the academy. Recent collections such as Q and A: Queer
in Asian America (1998), Queer Diasporas (Patton & Sánchez-Eppler
2000), the special issue of Callaloo on black queer studies (Vol. 23, No. 1)
and Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism
(2002) elaborate on the relationship of racial difference to the constitution of
in t e r v e n t i o n s ! 7: 2
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/ 246
maintained Indian tribes and under Hawaiian state law to Native Hawaiian
cultural preservation could be erased from the landscape if native groups
were understood to be ‘like race’.
Stuart Hall’s formulations suggest some additional strategies through
which these questions of race, cultural power and political struggle could be
imagined within , rather than against the grain of ‘the postcolonial’ or, in our
case, of ‘the queer’ (Hall 1996). Here my invocation of ‘queer’ alongside ‘the
postcolonial’ works more as a rhetorical and political juxtaposition than as
violent analogical conflation. In other words, just as India, Brazil, Mexico,
on the one hand, and Britain, Canada and the United States are not raced in
the same ways, does not mean that they are not raced in any way. To
extrapolate from Hall, the very constitution of the idea of queer/race studies
as in the general discourse of all theoretical and political projects is always
already operating, in Derridean terms, ‘under erasure’ (Hall 1996: 255). To
assume, then, for example, that the continued critique of racism, of
heterosexuality and of Europe in both queer and postcolonial studies
contradicts its desire to be ‘over’ precisely those preoccupations misses
Hall’s point. The project of queer/race studies is no exception, and as
practitioners and contributors to such a project, we are particularly aware of
the dangers of analogical and telos-driven thinking. Our goal as queer
scholars and teachers must then be to make sexuality co-constitutive with
writing on labor, race and colonialism, and intervene in discursive
formations that would disarticulate queer/race subjects. Thus, even as the
repetitions of colonial epistemes rework themselves in the language of
analogy, we must think of these echoes more as transactions, as necessary
narratives traded for one more day of life.
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