Terms of a Western discourse of homosexuality shape conflicts surrounding sexual identity that are faced by many Muslims, especially those who live in diasporic communities. Many use essentialized categories to articulate their sexual orientations and express incommensurabilities between their sexuality and their identities as Muslims. This article argues that discursive constructions of the Muslim as traditional other to the secular sexual subject of a modern democracy generate an uninhabitable subject position that sharply dichotomizes sexual orientations and Muslim family/religious orientations, a dichotomization that is reinforced by well-publicized backlashes against open homosexuality in several Muslim countries. Yet observations made during ethnographic field research in Pakistan, as well as scholarly evidence from other Muslim countries, suggest that many Muslims are less troubled by sex and desire in all their possible forms than they are by the peculiar modern practice of naming our sexualities as the basis for secular public identities. Keywords: diasporic Muslims, homosexuality, Pakistan, secularism Many homosexual Muslims are torn between their sexual orientation and the demand that they uphold the familyâs honor and Islam by hiding or repressing their desires and identities. Their fears are fueled by vivid headlines of imams declaring that homosexuals should be killed or
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Naming our sexualities: Secular constraints, Muslim freedoms
Ewing; Katherine Pratt
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, Volume 2011 (59)
Berghahn Books – Mar 1, 2011
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