The Empire of Sexuality: An Interview with Joseph Massad

The Empire of Sexuality: An Interview with Joseph Massad
I have however said that Gay Internationalist Arabs are complicit with imperialism, and their complicity is not unlike the complicity of nationalist Arabs or Islamist Arabs (in my book Desiring Arabs, I study how all three groups came to be complicit with Euro-American imperialism and Orientalism). The fact that all of these groups (and in the case of Gay Internationalists, I am referring here to those who are located in Beirut and Israel) are anti-imperialist in the sense that they oppose the imperial political, economic, and military presence of the United States or European countries in the Arab world, that they oppose US wars on the Arab and Muslim worlds, that they oppose Israeli and Zionist aggression against Palestine and the Palestinians, is well established in the official statements of their organizations and their literature. I am speaking of complicity at the level of epistemology and ontology, where all of these groups begin to understand themselves through a European universalized ontology and epistemology that is disseminated through imperial channels. That Arab nationalists begin in the late nineteenth century to see themselves and their history in cultural and civilizational terms follows this imperial universalization. That Muslims begin in the same period to speak of something amorphous called “Islam” that opposes itself to something called the “West” and that some of them begin to think of Islam as a “religion” or a “civilization” is also an effect of Orientalist and imperial impositions and internalization. Similarly, the tiny number of gay-identified Arabs organized in Gay Internationalist organizations are complicit with an imperial sexual regime that rearranges the world along the hetero-homo binary, which they fully adopt without questioning and insist on reproducing and disseminating across the Arab world as the road to liberation.