---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Badri Raina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sep 27, 2007 8:25 PM Subject: Re: misinterpreting ahmadinejad on homosexuality To: Sudhir Devadas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
the politics of interpretation, ed.mitchell, chicago, 1983! ----- Original Message ----- *From:* Sudhir Devadas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *To:* Badri Raina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Cc:* Sivaji Purushothaman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Sent:* Thursday, September 27, 2007 7:41 PM *Subject:* misinterpreting ahmadinejad on homosexuality Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:46:20 -0400 From: Louis Proyect < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Marxism] Comment from a lurker on Ahmadinejad and gays I was looking at the Marxism digest and noticed that everyone has taken the translator's translation of Ahmadinejad's comment on homosexuality as the truth of what he said. According to an Iranian friend of mine, with whom I watched the event, this was all very confused. Ahmadinejad could have meant a number of different things. First off, the basic point is that there are no laws against homosexuality in Iran. This is because it is a traditional, conservative regime, which believes that homosexuality is at most a behavior, but is not something to be recognized as an identity (unlike, say, women.) This produces the well-known paradox that in fact there is a great deal of permissiveness towards homosexuality in Iran. Two men can get a room for the night, a man and a woman cannot. Two men can even walk down the street holding hands. This is what he told me, and I know he is not lying because he also hates Ahmadinejad & has no interest in defending Ahmadinejad at all, just clearing up confusion. Second, it is quite possible that Ahmadinejad also flat out believes there are no homosexuals, which at least at one level is pretty absurd. But another level, he was quite correct in saying Iran doesn't have homosexuals the way we do. It is the United States and its identity politics that have made homosexuality into an identity, rather than a behavior. We think about homosexuality and deal with homosexuality differently than in Iran. I'm not saying it's just 'different cultures' and therefore beyond criticism, but just that there is a different way homosexuality has been constituted in the two countries. At the very least, his comment was not quite the absurdity it has been made out to be, and I think we can appreciate the truth of it without in anyway being associated with his politics. This, anyhow, was the clarification that this Iranian friend felt needed to be made, but was lost in the media circus. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
