On 7/28/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie:
>Turkey is a lot more capitalistic and Westernized than anywhere else
>in North Africa and West Asia. The more capitalistic and Westernized
>a society is, and the larger bourgeois and petit-bourgeois a society
>has, its sexual culture is closer to the Western model of thinking in
>terms of homo/bi/hetero sexual identities.
But Eastern Anatolia is the least developed part of Turkey, from a
capitalist development standpoint. It is not only less Westernized, it is
more like the Arab/Islamic societies that Massad writes about in his essay.
It is not only a place where it is impossible to be openly gay; it is also
impossible for a woman to assert her independence. Wife-beating is common,
and all in the name of Muslim piety.
I am not be well-read in queer studies, but I do have first-hand experience
with at least one country that has a 98 percent Muslim population and that
is ruled by an Islamic party. I don't need a postmodernist like Foucault to
serve as an intermediary. I have seen it with my own eyes and it needs to
be OVERTHROWN.
What needs to be overthrown?
The government? The Turkish government is more militantly secularist
than even the French government. I've met a lot of Turkish women who
say they came to the States because they wanted to go to school while
wearing hijab.
Culture? The best way to overthrow it would be to expropriate all the
remaining peasants: "About 40% of the labor force is engaged in
agriculture, which provided 13% of GDP in 2001" (at
<http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/Asia-and-Oceania/Turkey-AGRICULTURE.html>).
Proletarianize and urbanize them, break up their families, and make
most of them live as single men and women. Without such material
conditions most of them won't adopt the capitalist model of
homo/bi/hetero sexual identities.
IMHO, though, while the aforementioned material conditions are
desirable in themselves, the adoption of homo/bi/hetero sexual
identities isn't. Let them have sex any way they want without them.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
