Occidental Gender Trouble and the Creation of the Oriental Sodomite

Recent debates on the issue of “Arab homosexuality” place the creation of that identity category in a framework of European “epistemic hegemony,” putting thus the blame on both Nahdawi writers who adopted a Victorian morality and ethics from their western counterparts, and on contemporary “Arab” LGBT activists that participate in neoliberal NGO practices. These two agents allegedly imbibe a matrix of cis-heteronormativity alien to their societies at the time. Literary critics such as Khaled El-Rouayheb and Joseph Massad, foremost writers on the subject of the Nahda and homosexuality, have presented the nuanced relationship between Arab modernity, sexuality, and de-colonization. Yet, they have done so while charting a dynamic of power that does not sufficiently provincialize Europe nor re-contextualize the discourse into a longer history of “East/West” history of desire. My objective in this paper is to showcase small but significant instances of interaction between “The West” and the “Orient” on the issue of “same-sex” sexual contact in an effort to understand a trend of portraying “The Orient” as inherently sodomitic. Furthermore, my aim is to question the histories of “Arab” sexuality and modernity that are taken for granted in many of these debates. Thus, I will discuss a dynamic of power contradictory to the one presented in Joseph Massad’s Desiring Arabs, one that would question several pre- and post-colonialist arguments on the emergence of “homophobia” in Levantine contexts.