<http://montages.blogspot.com/2007/09/clash-of-sexual-civilizations.html> Clash of Sexual Civilizations
Questioned about the state of homosexuals in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at Columbia University: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country. We don't have that in our country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have it" ("President Ahmadinejad Delivers Remarks at Columbia University," CQ Transcripts Wire, 24 September 2007). The audience, shocked, responded with boos and laughter.
Now, that's a clash of sexual civilizations! In America, at least the liberal part of America represented by its great universities like Columbia, it is a norm that people define themselves by the gender of their sexual partners -- homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual -- and that self definition, sexual identity, is a very important part of themselves. In Iran, too, some people, especially younger urbanites, have adopted the aforementioned sexual categories whose origins Michel Foucault traces back to nineteenth-century bourgeois culture of the West.1 But a majority of Iranians, apparently including their President, have not adopted the idea of sexual orientations, nor have much of the rest of the Third World.
Western liberals and leftists know what to think of the North-South economic gap, but they have yet to figure out a way to sensibly handle this North-South sexual gap.
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1 See, especially, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990 [originally published in France in 1976 and translated into English in 1977]). Other useful works on the origins and development of modern discourse of sexuality include John D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity," Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, et al. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 100-113; and Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality, (New York: Dutton, 1995). -- Yoshie