{"id":7634,"date":"2009-09-15T01:29:16","date_gmt":"2009-09-14T15:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=7634"},"modified":"2009-09-15T01:29:16","modified_gmt":"2009-09-14T15:29:16","slug":"islam-and-teh-gheys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=7634","title":{"rendered":"Islam and teh gheys"},"content":{"rendered":"

Out of Place<\/em> asks daring and timely questions about the silence at the heart of queer studies. Discussing ‘race’ alongside ‘queer’ often submerges raciality within queerness, leaving racialised groups silent and silenced–‘out of place’. Out of Place<\/em> creates a space where queerness\/raciality are brought together in creative tension to disturb these silences: to hear the invisible, to see the inaudible.<\/p>\n

Out of Place<\/em> takes the reader through an inspiring, illuminating and at times painful journey. The book explores queerness\/raciality in the context of the ‘war on terror’; corporeal and social practices in and of space; relations between visibility and politics; and cultural, literary, linguistic and theoretical mechanisms of translation. The papers in Out of Place<\/em> cut across academic theory, arts, activism, the media and everyday life. All the contributors to Out of Place<\/em> address queerness\/ raciality as a theoretical and political tool to analyse and challenge their own fields, epistemologies and ontologies. This groundbreaking and fascinating book is not just about what happens at the intersection of ‘queer’ and ‘race’, but also about how this intersection relates to and animates other aspects of life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Uh-huh.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, one chapter in the book — Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the ‘war on terror’, Jin Haritaworn<\/a>, with Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem — has caused the publisher, Raw Nerve<\/a> (Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York), to issue an apology.<\/p>\n

To (Mount Waverley’s finest) Peter Tatchell<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The apology can be read here<\/a>, while the following is an extract from Haritaworn, Tauqir and Erdem’s essay:<\/p>\n

Our article focuses on the situation in Britain, where \u2018Muslim\u2019 and \u2018homophobic\u2019 are increasingly treated as interchangeable signifiers. The central figure in this process is Peter Tatchell who has successfully claimed the role of the liberator of and expert about Muslim gays and lesbians. This highlights the problems of a single-issue politics of representation, which equates \u2018gay\u2019 with white and \u2018ethnic minority\u2019 with heterosexual. At the same time, the fact that Tatchell\u2019s group Outrage passes as the emblem of queer and hence post-identity politics in Britain shows that the problem of Islamophobia is not reducible to the critique of identity. The active participation of right- as well as left-wing, feminist as well as gay, official as well as civil powers in the Islamophobia industry proves racism more clearly than ever to be a white problem, which crosses other social and political differences…<\/p>\n

Tatchell\u2019s high status in the queer scene, the wider left and the mainstream press render criticism of him dangerous. We have already mentioned the two most important critiques by Puar and Feinberg from the US [Puar, Jasbir (2006) \u2018On Terror: Queerness, Secularism, and Affect\u2019, Keynote Lecture at the Out of Place conference in Lancaster, 24\/25 March, 2006; Puar, Jasbir (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism In Queer Times<\/a><\/em>, Duke University Press, Durham; Feinberg, Leslie (2006) \u2018Anti-Iran protest misdirects LGBT struggle’<\/a>, Workers World<\/em> (17 July 2006), (accessed 17 October, 2006)]. Unfortunately, white allies in Europe who are prepared to make similar critiques in their own name are rare. This may partly be why queer Muslim activists in Britain have so far been alone in bearing Tatchell\u2019s caustic defence. He has especially targeted individuals who refused to assume their role as exceptional tokens. In this, he has employed tactics of intimidation and aggressive divide and rule among queer Muslims, progressive Muslims and the Inter Faith Community. In a typical reversal of actual power relations, Tatchell has attempted to discredit those who resist his patronage, by interpreting their resistance as an attack, and himself as their victim…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“I see” said the blind man.<\/p>\n

But he didn’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Out of Place asks daring and timely questions about the silence at the heart of queer studies. Discussing ‘race’ alongside ‘queer’ often submerges raciality within queerness, leaving racialised groups silent and silenced–‘out of place’. Out of Place creates a space … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,9,15],"tags":[340,338,337,341,339],"class_list":["post-7634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sex-sexuality","category-state","category-war-on-terror","tag-esra-erdem","tag-jin-haritaworn","tag-out-of-place","tag-peter-tatchell","tag-tamsila-tauqir"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6AyE-1Z8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7634"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7741,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7634\/revisions\/7741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}