On 10/11/07, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I think I still prefer Yoshie's bizarre, erotic
> political fan fiction about Islam and Iran.
>
> I wanna see where she goes with this, if she's able to
> perhaps concoct a new hypothetical pleasure dome in a
> mythical Xanadu like other Orientalist romanticists
> before her, in these purely conjectural, titillating
> flights of fancy of hers.
<http://montages.blogspot.com/2007/10/seduction-of-islam.html> Seduction of Islam
Western discourse about Islam today resembles Western discourse about homosexuality* before Stonewall: if you find "them" attractive, you either are or will soon become "one of them." This discourse imagines the relationship between the Westerner and Islam as if it were a sexual proposition: "One could liken Islam to a proposal of marriage made by a highly eligible if somewhat authoritarian man. In both cases, there is naturally a great temptation to accept the proposal, even if one's mind shyly raises some objections" (Stefan Weidner, "The Mystery of Conversion -- Why Islam Can Also Prove So Seductive to Westerners," Trans. Chris Cave, Goethe-Institut, September 2007). What is fascinating, the West is feminized in this usually Islamophobic, occasionally Islamophilic discourse (this Goethe-Institut article combines both qualities).
What should a historical materialist do about this anxious turn in Orientalism? Take it and turn it against itself. Appropriation is the name of the micro-political game here, in service to the macro-political Great Game to expropriate the empire. A historical materialist literary conceit for that may be, "I am the Western Civilization that ought to have existed but never did, being in love with, and proposing a temporary marriage (a quintessentially Shi'i custom) to, the Islamic Republic that is not yet but shall be."
* Quentin Crisp said in a documentary about Hollywood representation of homosexuality: "Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can't help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. . . . That's the famous joke: I don't like peas, and I'm glad I don't like them, because if I liked them, I would eat them, and I would hate them" (The Celluloid Closet, Dir. Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman [based upon the work of film historian Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies], 1995).
On 10/12/07, ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> On 12 Oct, 2007, at 11:14 AM, Lenin's Tomb wrote:
> >
> > Of course, if you consider it in light of what it does - which is
> > usually to eroticise domination up to and including violent
> > rape - it becomes less boring or comical than sinister and sick.
>
> Yikes, you need to get out of that Tomb more! The above is like so
> pre-fifth-wave-feminism! Porn is empowering! Embrace it. It's not my
> horniness that makes me watch porn, bro... its your prudishness that
> preventing you from doing the same! ;-)
Why is it that people who agree with me on sex don't agree with me on Iran and Islam and people who agree with me on Iran and Islam don't agree with me on sex? ;-) -- Yoshie