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Arab Homo Terrorism and the Gay Pornographic Cyber Imaginary
Abstract
Almost a decade after the attacks of September 11th, the current vitriolic debate about the construction of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero, the rise of the birther movement, and the erroneous belief held by some Americans that President Obama is a “closeted Muslim” highlights the rise of Islamophobia in the United States—a sentiment that puts in peril millions of Muslim Americans. In my proposed paper, I explore how queer Arab Americans are signified in the pornographic digital imaginary particularly after September 11th. I will argue that no where and at no other time has the collapse of the category “Terrorist” and “Arab” been palpably discernable than in the United States post September 11 and the ensuing War on Terror. In fact, Jasbir Puar contends that at this historical juncture, the invocation of the terrorist as queer, non-national and acutely racialized becomes ubiquitous.[i] This conflation between terrorist, Arab, and queer has had a dehumanizing effect on the Queer Arab American community. I will show how such representations are not entirely the fabrication of a heteronormative Islamophobic power bloc but that this stigmatization of the male Arab is highly palpable within the American queer community too. Consequently, I contend that the analysis of how gay Arab Americans are represented in pornographic websites exhibits a collusion between two types of normative power vectors that Arab Americans, both straight and gay, have to contend with: heteronormativity and a new emerging homonormativity in the US post September 11.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
North America
Sub Area
Cultural Studies