[lbo-talk] Clash of Sexual Civilizations (was Re: ahmadinejad)

[ravi]

On 25 Sep, 2007, at 11:18 AM, Miles Jackson wrote:
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>> On Sep 25, 2007, at 8:28 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> How do you know that's what Ahmadinejad meant? It wouldn't surprise
>> me if he was simploy denying that there are men in Iran who suck cock
>> and women who munch box. You think the engineer-president is up on
>> comparative queer theory?
>>
> Ahmadinejad doesn't need to know anything about queer theory to make
> this claim; he just needs to have grown up in a nonwestern society  
> that
> does not link sexual behavior to a stable sexual identity.  (In  
> fact, in
> the context of the culture in which he was socialized, the bizarre  
> thing
> would be for him to claim that there are homosexuals.)

One could say that this reflects back on the identity nature of US  
politics. By which I mean not just identity politics but also  
grounding political reasoning on identity -- a criticism I brought up  
of the recent Left/liberal castigation of Bill Richardson for not  
toeing the line on the "inborn" nature of [homo]sexuality.

I cannot claim to peer in Ahmedinejad's brain, but I think Michael  
Smith's point about acts being considered illegal (not existential  
states or attributes) is relevant -- one could read him as stating  
that Iran[ians] does not subscribe to that particular form of  
classification [of sexual identity], and what they have laws against  
are acts such as X (e.g: X = sodomy, whether practised by someone who  
identifies himself as gay or merely as a Republican). Of course, such  
laws are unjust.

An example of how [Western] conceptualising tends to be objectivised  
(and thus universalised), masking alternate forms and classifications  
can be had by reading a bit about the Hijras of India: http:// 
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia).

	--ravi