g_b Gay Rights as Human Rights: Pinkwashing Homonationalism

[Aditya Bondyopadhyay]

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3560/gay-rights-as-human-rights_pinkwashing-homonationa


Gay Rights as Human Rights: Pinkwashing
Homonationalism<http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3560/gay-rights-as-human-rights_pinkwashing-homonationa>

by Maya Mikdashi <http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/contributors/654>


It is difficult to know whether to laugh or cry at the news that the United
States has come out as the global defender of LGBTQ rights. This confusion
is not only due to the United States' own record on gay rights, but perhaps
more importantly, it is due to the United States' role as the premier
imperial power in the world today. After all, while Secretary of State
Clinton acknowledged that the United States has an imperfect record of
defending and legislating gay rights
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/14/ED4C1MBMK6.DTL&type=gaylesbian>domestically,
she was curiously silent about how and why, exactly, the United States
would monitor and regulate LGBTQ rights internationally. Would the American
army, for example, start “enforcing” the rights of gay Iraqis or gay
Afghanis? Would the United States impose sanctions on governments that were
non-homo friendly? Would Secretary Clinton welcome the intervention of the
“international community” over the fact that people are denied the rights
to live with their families due to an immigration law that gives right of
residence on the basis of a couples' genitalia? What, exactly, does Clinton
mean when she says that the world over, “gay rights” should be recognized
as “human rights?”

At the UN Clinton offered a quick
history<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MudnsExyV78> of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She mentioned, correctly, that
the document was in part in response to the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust
and WWII. As Hannah Arendt has written, the urgency with which the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written was informed by the idea
there *must* be more to being a human than being a citizen. For centuries,
those not deemed “ready” or “capable” of politics or civilization had been
relentlessly exterminated and enslaved. With the rise of the nation state
and Euro-American imperialism, the world became stratified between citizens
(of different hierarchies) and non-citizens (of different hierarchies).
Citizens had rights, non-citizens did not until, in the terrifying logic of
the enlightenment, they proved they were “ready.” Due to the conflation of
rights and citizenship in the modern period-particularly in totalitarian
states-people who had been stripped of citizenship, as Jews in Germany
were, would be confined to an existence outside of law, outside of
regulation, and by extension, outside of humanity. But Arendt's true lesson
is not the story of a victory of human rights legislation, but rather her
prescient warning that the legal production of the “human right” as *prior *to
that of the citizen could only come through the increasing ability of the
state to regulate life and to determine when, how, and to what degree the
two poles of “human rights” and “political justice” could be collapsed* **
and* alienated.

In her speech Secretary Clinton was, perhaps unknowingly, reproducing this
generative alienation between political and human rights. She emphasized
that LGBTQs everywhere had the same rights to love and have sex with
whomever they choose as partners, and to do so safely. In making this
statement, she reiterated a central tenet of what Jasbir Puar
<http://www.facebook.com/pages/Terrorist-Assemblages/106827812693416>names
homonationalism: the idea that LGBTQs the world over experience, practice,
and are motivated by the same desires, and that their politics are grounded
in an understanding that ties 1) the directionality of their love and
desire into a stable identity and 2) that stable identity into the grounds
from which one speaks and makes political claims. Secretary Clinton
suggested that queers everywhere, whether white or black, male or female or
transgendered, soldier or civilian, rich or poor, Palestinian or Israeli,
can be comprehended and interpellated through the same rights framework.
But the content of what she she calls “gay rights” is informed by the
experiences and histories of (namely white gay male) queers in the United
States, and thus there is an emphasis on visibility and identity politics
and an elision of the class and political struggles that animate the lives
of the majority of the third world's heterosexual* **and *homosexual
populations. Thus detached from its locality, “gay rights” can travel
internationally not only as a vehicle for normative homo-nationalism, but
as a vehicle for neoliberal ways of producing politics and subjects more
broadly.

Of course, as Clinton said, homosexuality is not an export from “the west.”
Homosexuality is not like Coca Cola or Cheerios. It is not diasporic, in
that it has a fixed origin point that then is spread throughout the rest of
the world, even if it is true that what it means to *identify* today as
homosexual *is* historic and emerges at its apex within the transition from
the civil rights era, through the GRID/ AIDS killing zones, to the era of
liberal identity politics in the United States. Furthermore, non-Western
people who identify as homosexual through a homo-national narrative or
through the consumption of homonational products are not somehow
“inauthentic.” They are markers of the reality that we live within a world
that is increasingly connected through the movement of people, capital and
information yet increasingly stratified across class and political lines.
We live in a world of rights and in a world where the female and/or queer
gendered body (but never, we should note, the male heterosexual body) has
become a political anchor. This success story did not begin with
homonationalism, which is only one of its latest railways stations.
Homonationalism is not the end goal of a conspiratorial “gay
international,” rather, it is only one aspect of the reworking of the world
according to neoliberal logics that maintain not only the balance of of
power between states, but also within them. In fact, homonationalism
produces normative homosexuality in the same fashion that normative
“heterosexuality” continues to be shaped and regulated internationally
through the interventions of human rights corporations, international
funding and research agencies, and the foreign and domestic policies of
states. Thus the The World Bank, The UNDP, Human Rights Watch, and the US
State Department together project ideal modes of heterosexuality by
promoting “adult” ages of consent, educated, employed and (re) productive
couples, and love/choice, non kin and non arranged marriages that mimic the
model of “stranger sociality” at large. Within a neoliberal framework, all
of these are not seen as “political interventions” but merely policy
recommendations. Clinton's speech fits neatly into this project by
isolating “gay rights” as rights to identity, from “political justice,”
understood as the continuos participation in the reconfiguration of power
and the grammar of life that it licenses. To act within a framework of
political justice implies an acceptance to play the role of agitator, an
acceptance to act in the spaces that human rights cannot and will not
capture for both disciplinary and political reasons. It is to act knowing
that you will never achieve your goals, but that you will play a role in
pushing the cause of justice forward even if, by definition, justice can
never be achieved because it is constantly moving. It is a positionality,
not a position. As Arendt once explained, political activism is acting with
the knowledge that you *will* fail, but that you *care *enough to act under
this signature of immanent failure.

Let's take the case of Palestine, which, as activists and academics have
recently highlighted, is being subjected to a
pinkwashing<http://www.pinkwatchingisrael.com/> campaign
by the Israeli 
government<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/01/israels-gay-propaganda-war>.
Here, a focus on “gay rights” or “women's rights” as opposed to “political
justice” in fact repeats a colonial distinction made by a British mandate
between two populations, a Jewish one that would have rights to a homeland,
and a non-Jewish (the word Palestinian was not used) one that was to enjoy
full civil rights. In the British mandate for Palestine, no mention was
made of non-Jews' *political *rights, an omission which in hindsight we
understand to be informed by the attempt to continue to deny the indigenous
people of Palestine self determination, while promising them that they
practice of life (as separate from politics) would continue without
discrimination. Today, the promise of “gay rights” for Palestinian goes
something like this: The United States will protect your right to not be
detained because as a gay, but will not protect you from being detained
because you are Palestinian. As a queer, you have the right to love and
have sex with whomever you choose safely and without discrimination, but
you do not have the right to be un-occupied, or to be free from oppression
based on your political beliefs, actions, and affiliations. As long as it
is Arabo-Islamic culture and its manifestation through (Palestinian) law
that is oppressing you, we are here for you. If you are being oppressed by
Israeli colonial policies, you're on your own. As long as you confine your
politics to your sexuality, and you speak as a *queer* subaltern in a
language of rights that we understand (because we wrote it) we are here for
you. One is tempted to call the production of such a narrow and reductive
framework through which queers are to become politically legible an
exercise in homophobia.

Many progressive critics miss the point that pinkwashing, the process by
which the government of Israel attempts to promote itself as a safe haven
for Palestinian queers from “their culture,” is not primarily about gay
rights or homosexuality at all. Pinkwashing only makes sense as a political
strategy within a discourse of Islamophobia and Arabophobia, and it is part
of a larger project to anchor *all* politics within the axis of identity,
and identitarian (and identifiable) groups. Thus critics of pinkwashing who
assume an international queer camaraderie repeat a central tenet of
homonationalism: homosexuals *should*  be in solidarity with and empathize
with each other* because* they are homosexual. Sarah
Schulman<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/opinion/pinkwashing-and-israels-use-of-gays-as-a-messaging-tool.html>
recently
wrote in the New York Times about the dangers of “the co-opting of white
gay people by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim political forces in Western
Europe and Israel.” One should ask why white gays are seen as always being
co-opted by these forces, rather than as active producers of and willing
participants in racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia. If queer activists in
Palestine have taught us anything, it is that not all homosexuals are
allies or potential allies. A gay Israeli in a military uniform is both an
enemy and a target of anti-occupation politics, just as a gay Zionist in
the United States is an enemy of the Palestinian cause* and the cause* *of
queer Palestinians because they are rooted within that Palestinian national
cause*. The idea that Euro-American gays must be appealed to on the basis
of their sexuality by others who share their sexuality partakes in the the
alienation of both sexuality from politics and of “queer Palestinians” from
their non-queer selves and communities. It also panders to and reproduces a
homonational argument that Euro-American gays are more likely to respond if
they are addressed by an indigenous gay that, preferably, speaks about the
Palestinian cause in the common tongue of LGBTQ rights.
Furthermore, Schulman's argument rests on the idea that there is something *
different,*and potentially redemptive,* *about being gay, and in making
this claim she relies on the affective scars of the universalized
experience of homophobia. But homophobia is not one thing, nor is it
experienced in the same way or to the same extent by homosexuals the world
over (because they themselves are not the same thing). Moreover, homophobia
could be a less defining experience than say, the racism experienced by an
African American queer or a Syrian queer protesting against
authoritarianism and neoliberal market restructuring. In fact, the
experience of homophobia as the *primary discrimination* one faces in life
is usually the mark of an otherwise privileged existence. For the majority
of the people of the world, oppression, to paraphrase Edward Said on
culture, is contrapuntual. It moves, is multi-directional, it is adaptive,
and it forms a terrain of interconnected injustices

One of the surprising lessons we can learn from the emerging debate on
pinkwashing is the extent to which homonationalism has become hegemonic.
Both the Israeli government and pinkwatching -not pinkwashing- activists
partake in different aspects of homonationalism because they *must* in
order to be heard by the same intended audience: white gays who have
economic and political resources. Pinkwatching-not *pinkwashing* -
activists, in trying to counter Israel's attempt to mobilize gay rights
discourses to justify their brutal military occupation and ongoing policies
of colonial settlement, teach us all a bitter lesson. Groups that try to
counter pinkwashing by engaging in what they call *pinkwatching*, like
PQBDS<http://www.pqbds.com/>
, Al-Qaws <http://www.alqaws.org/q/>, and Pinkwatching
Israel<http://www.pinkwatchingisrael.com/>,
try to strategically deploy homonationalism in order to include within it
notions of political and economic justice for all Palestinians. They walk
the precarious line between the daily realities of LGBTQ discrimination and
oppression and the dangers of separating and elevating that particular
discrimination over the terrain of interconnected oppressions that forms,
in part, what it means to be Palestinian. They show us that the language of
gay rights in the Arab world is a double bind: we must use it in order to
achieve restitution from very real, and very immediate oppression, but as
we use this language *it mobilizes us* in a struggle to transform questions
of social, political, and economic justice into claims of discrimination.
This discrimination, in turn, can only be addressed by nation states or by
international political bodies that are actively involved in oppressing our
peoples, our families and loved ones, and the parts of us that not captured
by the LGBTQ paradigm. We cannot "choose" to not be who we have become, but
we must recognize how we have been formed as neoliberal rights seeking and
speaking bodies, and how this formation is linked to a history of
depoliticization and alienation. In other words, we must be both tactical
and skeptical when this language reaches to embrace us, and when we, as
activists and as academics, use it ourselves. We must find ways to
critically inhabit this homonational world and try, always, to act within
the uncomfortable and precarious line between rights and justice.