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To commemorate Sept 11, 2001, a few bits from Terrorist Assemblages #Thread
Post-9/11 detention praxis produces a rupturing of transnational heterosexual kinship formations, as Muslim men—brothers, husbands, fathers, uncles, grandfathers—are disappeared, vanishing from work, while going to pick up groceries, from their homes in the middle of the night.
Many queer of color groups, mostly located in major urban locales, reported that immediately after the events of Sept 11 their lines of solidarity fell toward their respective nonqueer mainstream racial and immigrant advocacy groups rather than with mainstream queer organizations
The process of homonationalist inclusions-exclusions co- heres not through 9/11 as a solitary temporal moment. September 11 some- times seems to function as an originary trigger, fostering a dangerous historical reification (what is sometimes referred to as the “9/11 industry.”)
The USA patriot Act of October 26, 2001, is often decried as the most egregious post-9/11 state of exception legislation
The event-ness of September 11 refuses the binary of watershed moment and turning point of radical change, ver- sus intensification of more of the same, tethered between its status as a ‘‘history-making moment’’ and a ‘‘history-vanishing moment.’’
even as patriotism immediately after September 11 was inextricably tied to a reinvigoration of heterosexual norms for Americans, progressive sexuality was championed as a hallmark of U.S. modernity. For despite this reentrenchment of heteronormativity, the United States...
..was also portrayed as ‘‘feminist’’ in relation to the Taliban’s treatment of Afghani women (a concern that had been previously of no interest to U.S. foreign policy) and gay-safe in comparison to the Middle East
The Empire Strikes Back . . . So you like skyscrapers, huh, b*tch? —The legend on posters that appeared in midtown Manhattan only days after September 11, depicting a turbaned caricature of Osama bin Laden being anally penetrated by the Empire State Building
..following September 11, 2001, SALGA members across the tristate area reported numerous sexual, verbal, + physical assaults on queer South Asians who were mugged, beaten, molested. We were struggling to articulate a relationship between queer bashing + racist hate crimes
Since September 11, 2001, Sikh men wearing turbans, mistaken for kin of Osama bin Laden, have been disproportionately affected by backlash racist hate crimes.
‘The turban is not a hat’’ became the slogan for an educational Sikh crusade, a central organizing refrain for numerous national Sikh advocacy groups soon after September 11, 2001, who were reckoning with a surge of reported assaults on turbaned men mistaken for Muslim terrorists
Leti Volpp: September 11 facilitated the consolidation of a new identity category that groups together persons who appear ‘Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim.’..a racialization wherein members of this group are identified as terrorists, and are dis-identified as citizens.’’
Since September 11, 2001, for example, many activists and community members from SALGA in New York have voiced sentiments similar to this one, expressed by a Pakistani Muslim queer man: ‘‘My sexuality has taken a back seat to my ethnicity."
Thus the ‘‘gains’’ achieved for queers, gains that image the United States in sexually exceptional terms, media, kinship (gay marriage), legality (sodomy), consumption (queer tourism) and so forth, can be read in the context of the war on terror, the USA patriot Act, ...
...the Welfare Reform Act, and unimpeded U.S. imperialist expansion, as conservative victories at best
in case i still messed up this thread thing, these are some bits from the 2007 edition of Terrorist Assemblages in commemoration of September 11, 2001. #September11
Don't waste your time getting angry about or arguing with #PaulKrugman! Here are a few more passages:
The explosive volatility of a concept such as “terrorist assemblage”..lies precisely in its capacity to refuse the categories + protocols of a security apparatus whose energies have been mobilized and sustained by a phobic image of the terrorist Other. @TavNyongo Foreword, 2017
The ‘‘sexual torture scandal’’ at Abu Ghraib is an instructive example of the interplay between exception and exceptionalism whereby the deferred death of one population recedes as the securitization and valorization of the life of another population triumphs in its shadow.
The sexual humiliation and ritual torture of Iraqi prisoners enabled the Bush administration to forge a crucial distinction between the supposed depravity of Abu Ghraib and the ‘‘freedom’’ being built in Iraq.
2017 ed: The terrain of homonationalism has always been contradictory and in-flux, and never focalizing whether a nation has or does not have rights protections for lgbtq populations. Rather, it is about use of such rights within modes of global governmentality as a marker of..
..civilized status, and as a frame for understanding why and how “homophobia” and its liberal counterpart, tolerance, are used to laud populations with certain attributes at some moments and then vilify other (racialized) populations for these same attributes...
...Unlike after 9/11, however, the use of Islamophobia as a cover for homophobia, or the use of an anticipatory homophobia in the face of a manipulable Islamophobia, seems to be a discourse that many are now truly aware of, much more so than ten years ago.
2017: Trump-era style homonationalism is masterfully elastic, sustaining the production of feared racial others and religious others on behalf of, but never directly benefiting (Christian secular), queers. Having seen, in March 2017, a picture of talk-show host and lesbian...
...identified Ellen DeGeneres hugging war criminal George W. Bush on The Ellen Show, homonationalism works not only to justify a religious Muslim ban in (queer) secular terms...
but also to enact an affective normalization of 9/11 and its architects, the war-mongering of Bush, the sanitized neoliberal civility of Obama.
For a fabulous new book that focuses on homocapitalism as a neoliberal transition and/or partner to the civilizational-driven homonationalism, please read Rahul Rao's Out of Time @thariel End!
