White gay men in two post-9/11 novels: “Cultural surveillance” and historical echoes

ABSTRACT

This article argues that two recent novels, Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Tabish Khair’s 2012 How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, navigate the quiet complicities around quotidian post-9/11 Islamophobic suspicion by pairing the surveillance of Muslim “others” with the surveillance of sexual “others”. In particular, it argues that in both texts, narrative form implicates the reader in the surveillance of South Asian Muslim men and white gay men. In doing so, the article links the US and UK’s state racism of the present with their historical state homophobia, showing how the novels connect historically different strategies of “guilt by association”.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamophobia
• Muslim men
• gay men
• culture talk
• surveillance
• stereotypes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The novel makes the textual revelation of a reified sexual identity a feature, unlike the 2012 Mira Nair adaptation, during which Changez observes Jim interact with his partner without any reaction.

2. “Integrationist politics over the last decade have explicitly targeted Muslims as the least assimilable among [ ... ] immigrants” and a “pernicious binary pits white, secular gays against fundamentalist homophobic Muslims” (Lentin and Titley 2011, 222). Such reification aids politicians in making claims about unified “British values”, which displaces homophobia onto minorities (BBC News 2015).

3. “A stadium of 25,000 people screaming homophobic or sexist slurs” during football matches (Reuters 2017) contrasts with the tourist website proclaiming Danish tolerance: https://www.visitcopenhagen.com/copenhagen/lgbt/lgbtq-copenhagen.

4. Their publication of “The Face of Muhammad” in 2005 provoked violent protests.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shamira A. Meghani

Shamira A. Meghani publishes on queer, postcolonial and diasporic literary and film texts, and currently teaches postcolonial and related literature in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.