Queer Rights and the Triangulation of Western Exceptionalism

Abstract

Given recent advances in queer visibility and rights within Western countries and internationally, the assumption around sexual issues is one of progress. Conversely, resistance to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and questioning (LGBTIQ) rights is understood as a lack of progress in the modernization of the relevant society or population. This article suggests that one must understand resistance in a more complex framework, focusing on the opposition between Muslim cultures and LGBTIQ politics to illustrate this argument. This article argues that one should understand the dialectic of Islam versus queer rights as a process of triangulation and should describe how the positioning of queer rights and Muslim homophobia within a triangulated model invokes a sense of Western exceptionalism. Consequently, this article argues that the deployment of queer rights both at “home” and “abroad” operates in a “homocolonialist” fashion that renders resistant populations inferior in relation to superior Western values, rather than as simply “lagging behind” the West.

Notes

A joint statement by 85 states in March 2011 to the UN Human Rights Council called for action on sexuality, followed by a resolution for the same in June, which also commissioned a report from the Human Rights Commissioner on the extent of discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity. See Human Rights Council (2011). The report was delivered in November 2011, Discriminatory Laws and Practices and Acts of Violence Against Individuals Based on their Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, and this activism ultimately produced the 2012 report, which is the first to establish member-state obligations to protect the rights of LGBTIQ peoples, Born Free and Equal: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in International Human Rights Law. See Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (2012). For a review of cases and decisions in international human right law prior to this period, see Hamzic (2011) and Waites (2009).

LGBTTIQQ2SA is the acronym used by the 2014 World Pride Human Rights Conference Committee “to represent a broad array of identities such as, but not limited to, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, intersex, queer, questioning, two-spirited, and allies” (see World Pride 2014). For brevity I use LGBTIQ for sexual diversity politics and identities since this is now (one) common usage in academia, as is the term “queer,” which I use synonymously. “Queer” has a more precise meaning within academic queer theory, but I am not using it in that sense in this article.

See Associated Press (2014).

Regional jurisdictions within Nigeria and Somalia apply the same penalty: The latter is a Muslim nation while the former is currently 48 percent Muslim and will be a Muslim majority nation by 2030.

The Commonwealth of Nations includes the following Muslim-majority nations; Bangladesh, Brunei, the Gambia, Malaysia, Maldives, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, and three countries with very significant Muslim populations—India, Nigeria, and Tanzania. Lennox and Waites demonstrate that human rights did not feature until the 1991 Harare declaration at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and that sexual orientation remained absent then and remains out with official policies today, despite increasing activism on the issue (2013: 35–37). All Muslim states in Africa except Morocco are also members of the African Union (AU), which does not refer to the rights of LGBTIQ people but prioritizes the heterosexual family as the basis of society (African Union 2014). The Arab League nations are all Muslim-majority states and adopted a Charter on Human Rights in 2008 but with no mention of sexuality or LGBTIQ and instead emphasizes the family (Arab League 2014). Asian IGOs include the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) founded in 1967, which counts the Muslim-majority states of Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia amongst its members but does not address human rights issues or homosexuality in its activities that remain mostly regional economic cooperation and development (ASEAN 2014).

Prepared by the Islamic Council and presented to the Muslim World League (2014) then UNESCO. The Muslim World League still exists but has been superseded in political terms by the Organization of Islamic Co-Operation. The declaration is available on various websites and reprinted as Saleem Azzam (1998).

This IGO was founded in 1969 and is the second largest after the UN and currently comprises 57 member states (all Muslim-majority nations and some with significant Muslim populations) and is now called the Organization on Islamic Co-Operation. Its approach to human rights is based on Islamic teachings (as witnessed in the Cairo Declaration) and emphasizes “good governance and promotion of human rights in the Muslim world, especially with regard to rights of children, women, and elderly and the family values enshrined by Islam” (Organization of Islamic Co-operation 2013).

The World Values Survey is an international network of social scientists who collect and analyze data on beliefs and attitudes from representative samples at the national level. Data are organized into waves of four-year time periods, beginning in 1981, and are drawn from around 80 countries. The European Values Survey was the original project and formed the model for wider global comparisons conducted since the second wave (World Values Survey 2014).

See Dart (2014).

The authors explain that “gay” is the most relevant term in the Dutch context (Mepschen et al. 2010: 963).

In their introduction to a special issue of Sexualities on the Queer Netherlands, Hekma and Duyvendak confirm this normalization but also point out the ambivalence towards public and nonmonogamous homosexuality in Dutch society: “The invisibility of homosexuality asked for by many Muslims is thus also demanded by many white Dutch, albeit in a different way: we accept you as long as we don't have to see that you exist or have to see what you do. For their part, lesbians continue to remain largely invisible in public life and the media” (2011: 627).

In a longer term retrospective view, it would of course be easy to simply slot in the progress of queer rights into a linear model, assuming most resistance was eventually overcome in the West, but the contemporary moment does not allow for such a simple reading.

Lennox and Waites point out that the British Government is continuing with this strategy, threatening to link aid to respect for human rights, and that some NGOs such as the London-based Human Dignity Trust risk being seen as imposing Western ideas of queer identity and rights (2013: 39–42).

Notable examples include the Iranian President's response that “we don't have homosexuals like in your country” after being challenged on gay rights by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger during a visit in 2007, see Goldman (2007). The OIC also organized resistance to SOGI rights at the UN. Canada's current Foreign Affairs minister regularly condemns Iran on queer rights issues, as have the US and British Governments.

Lennox and Waites cite the negative response of the Ghanaian President to such demands made by the British Prime Minister in the context of the Commonwealth, demonstrating precisely that such interventions reiterate the process of triangulation of Western exceptionalism and so reify the discrete positionality of Western and non-Western nations on this issue (2013: 37–38). See other examples of this process in the rest of the collection by Lennox and Waites (2013), particularly those focused on the Caribbean, and various chapters in Weiss and Bosia (2013), particularly the one by Kaoma on African examples (2013).

Modood details the institutional processes that this would involve in much more detail than I have space for, but his preference is for active civil society development, rather than a state-led, top-down, incorporation of religious groups. I support this view because the former is much more likely to produce more Muslim groups centered on gender and sexuality.