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Abstract
The Queen Boat 52 is the most highly-publicized crackdown on same-sex practices in an Arab country. By examining the case, this paper intervenes into the recent debate on gay rights activism in Arab and Islamic countries and addresses the postcolonial predicament facing human rights activists on the question of intervention. The paper proposes to reconcile the tension between critiques of gay rights activism and the practical imperative to address state violations against same-sex practitioners. Because the state bases its persecution of homosexuals on the constitution of gay subjectivity, the paper argues that Egypt's postcolonial condition, like that of other Arab countries, necessitates a human rights framework that is based on a discourse and a set of strategies for attaining sexual rights that activists cannot not want to employ.
Notes
1. These arrests occurred in the wake of the Egyptian government's increased monitoring of the activities of men engaging in homosexual activities on the internet. Subsequent to the establishment of the Internet Crimes Unit at the Interior Ministry, gay chat rooms and matchmaking websites were shut down and several incidents of police entrapment occurred, whereby police arrests were conducted through fake dates from the internet. For a more detailed rendition of the round-up and torture, see Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture: The Assault on Justice in Egypt's Crackdown on Homosexual Conduct, February 29, 2004, http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2004/02/29/time-torture (accessed September 4, 2009); Amnesty International, EGYPT: Torture and Imprisonment for Actual or Perceived Sexual Orientation, December 19, 2001, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE12/033/2001 (accessed September 4, 2009); and Hossam Bahgat, “Explaining Egypt's Targeting of Gays,” Middle East Report Online, July 23, 2001, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero072301.html (accessed September 4, 2009).
2. Bahgat, “Explaining Egypt's Targeting of Gays.”
3. This is an exceptional court created after former President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981; a court which is typically reserved for terrorism and espionage cases. This state of emergency has been continually re-instated by the Egyptian government since the creation of the emergency law and its attendant court. The right of appeal does not extend to the decisions of these courts. Because the office of the current president, Hosni Mubarak, in his capacity as military governor, oversees all cases and appeals in these courts, the independence of the judiciary is effectively eliminated. Because a case could not be made for “contempt of religion,” according to one account, it was necessary that a case be found against the detainees because the state had alleged exposing a “specious network.” The men were finally charged with the crime of practicing “habitual debauchery” under articles 9 (c) and 15 of Law 10 of 1961 on Combating Prostitution. One man was charged with the crime of “contempt of religion” under article 98 (f) of the Criminal Code and another man for both charges. See Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture, 41–5 and Amnesty International, EGYPT: Torture and imprisonment, 5–8.
4. Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture, 45.
5. Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture, 46.
6. Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture.
7. Negar Azimi, “Prisoners of Sex,” New York Times Magazine, December 3, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03arabs.html (accessed September 4, 2009), 1.
8. Katherine Franke, “Sexual Tensions of Post-Empire,” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 33 (2004): 79.
9. Katherine Franke, “Sexual Tensions of Post-Empire,” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 33 (2004), 20–1.
10. Katherine Franke, “Sexual Tensions of Post-Empire,” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 33 (2004), 21.
11. Katherine Franke, “Sexual Tensions of Post-Empire,” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 33 (2004), 21.
12. Azimi, “Prisoners of Sex,” 1.
13. Franke, “Sexual Tensions,” 21 and Karin van Nieuwkerk, A Trade Like Any Other: Female Dancers and Singers in Egypt (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1995), 46–8.
14. See Nicola Pratt, “The Queen Boat case in Egypt: Sexuality, National Security and State Sovereignty,” Review of International Studies 33 (2007): 139–40; Philip Smucker, “A Clash of Cultures in Egypt,” The Christian Science Monitor, September 18, 2001, http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0918/p6s1-wome.html (accessed September 4, 2009), Azimi, “Prisoners of Sex”; and Scott Long, “The Trials of Culture: Sex and Security in Egypt,” Middle East Report Online, Spring 2004, http://www.merip.org/mer/mer230/230_long.html (accessed September 4, 2009).
15. van Nieuwkerk, A Trade Like Any Other, 47.
16. The Capitulations during this period provided legal protection for foreigners in Egypt, and it was “the legal agreement which gave foreigners the right to be tried in their own consular courts. Attempts to bring them to court or to close down their brothels were largely ineffective.” van Nieuwkerk, A Trade Like Any Other, 45.
17. Bahgat, “Explaining Egypt's Targeting of Gays,” and Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture, 31.
18. On the media response to the US legislators’ condemnation of the trial, and on the stipulation to resolve outstanding human rights issues in order to ratify the Euro–Mediterranean Association Agreement between Egypt and the European Union, see Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture, 40 and Amnesty International, EGYPT, 8.
19. Franke, “Sexual Tensions,” 22.
20. Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture, 7; Bahgat, “Explaining Egypt's Targeting of Gays”; Pratt, “The Queen Boat Case,” 134–5; and Hassan El Menywai, “Persecution of Homosexuals: The Egyptian Government's Trojan Horse against Religious Groups,” Human Rights Brief: A Legal Resource for the International Human Rights Community 14, (2006): 17.
21. Pratt, “The Queen Boat Case,” 135.
22. Pratt, “The Queen Boat Case,” 135.
23. Women's rights have relatively benefited in recent years. For example, women were able to finally secure unilateral divorce under Islamic law in 2000 after much resistance. Under the auspices of Egypt's First Lady, the status of women is being raised, reflecting a high level of political commitment to women's initiatives by the presidency, such as campaigns to abolish female genital mutilation.
24. Pratt, “The Queen Boat Case,” 135.
25. Pratt, “The Queen Boat Case,”, 137.
26. Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture, 39.
27. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6.
28. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6.
29. For an examination of debates on sexuality and how they began to figure in state policy, see Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 191–268. In particular, Massad indicates that signs of the inevitability of a crackdown on alleged homosexuals were perceivable, 256.
30. Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture, 49.
31. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
32. See Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture, 49 and Azimi, “Prisoners of Sex,” 1.
33. Bahgat, “Explaining Egypt's Targeting of Gays,” and El Menyawi, “Persecution of Homosexuals,” 19.
34. El Menywai, “Persecution of Homosexuals,” 17.
35. El Menywai, “Persecution of Homosexuals,”, 18.
36. El Menywai, “Persecution of Homosexuals,”.
37. See The Egyptian Constitution, http://www.egypt.gov.eg/english/laws/constitution (accessed September 4, 2009).
38. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), 76–82.
39. Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture, 14.
40. See Adel Omar Sherif, “The Rule of Law in Egypt from a Judicial Perspective: A Digest Landmark Decisions of the Supreme Constitutional Court,” in The Rule of Law in the Middle East and the Islamic World: Human Rights and the Judicial Process, eds. Eugene Cotran and Mai Yamani (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000).
41. El Menyawi, “Persecution of Homosexuals,” 41.
42. Diane Singerman, “The Politics of Emergency Rule in Egypt,” Current History 101, (2002): 32.
43. Hanna Pitkin, “The Idea of a Constitution,” Journal of Legal Education 37 (1987): 167.
44. For continued persecution of homosexuals after the Queen Boat incident, see Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture, 49–72 and Amnesty International, EGYPT, 14.
45. Joseph Massad, “Re-orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” Public Culture 14, (2002), 361–85.
46. Joseph Massad, “Re-orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” Public Culture 14, (2002), 362.
47. Joseph Massad, “Re-orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” Public Culture 14, (2002), 363.
48. Joseph Massad, “Re-orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” Public Culture 14, (2002), 364.
49. Carl Stychin, “The Globalization of Sexual Identities: Universality, Tradition, and the (Post)Colonial Encounter,” in Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies, ed. David Theo Goldberg, Michael Musheno and Lisa C. Bower (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 276.
50. Carl Stychin, “The Globalization of Sexual Identities: Universality, Tradition, and the (Post)Colonial Encounter,” in Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies, ed. David Theo Goldberg, Michael Musheno and Lisa C. Bower (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 279.
51. Scholarship on Arab and Muslim desires relied on ahistoricism to render their representations. For further elaboration, see Massad, “Re-orienting Desire,” 366.
52. Stychin, “The Globalization of Sexual Identities,” 284.
53. Brian Whitaker, Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 11.
54. For an example of another such context, see Stychin's discussion of the Zimbabwean context, “The Globalization of Sexual Identities,” 278.
55. For elaboration on this point, see Agamben, Homo Sacer.
56. Whitaker, Unspeakable Love, 11.
57. Whitaker, Unspeakable Love, 11. (emphasis added).
58. Whitaker, Unspeakable Love, 211–12.
59. Massad, “Re-orienting Desire,” 367.
60. Whitaker, Unspeakable Love, 212.
61. El Menyawi, “Activism from the Closet: Gay Rights Strategising in Egypt,” Melbourne Journal of International Law 7 (2006): 30.
62. Whitaker, Unspeakable Love, 216.
63. See Whitaker's discussion on visibility, Whitaker, Unspeakable Love, 215–16.
64. See Whitaker's discussion on visibility, Whitaker, Unspeakable Love, 216.
65. El Menyawi, “Activism from the Closet,” 30.
66. El Menyawi, “Activism from the Closet,”, 30–31.
67. Massad, “Re-orienting Desire,” 363.
68. Massad, “Re-orienting Desire,”, 374.
69. For a detailed discussion of this point, see Massad, “Re-orienting Desire,”, 371–85.
70. Stychin, “The Globalization of Sexual Identities,” 281.
71. Stychin, “The Globalization of Sexual Identities,”, 281 (emphasis added).
72. One such example is James Kirchick, “Queer Theory,” The New Republic, October 15, 2007, http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/queer-theory (accessed September 5, 2009).
73. Amnesty International, EGYPT, 1–2.
74. El Menywai, “Activism from the Closet,” 43.
75. El Menywai, “Activism from the Closet,”, 44.
76. Massad specifically mentions the effect of colonialism on Arab and Islamic attitudes towards contraception and the language used to describe sexuality and sexual deviance. See “Re-orienting Desire,” 371–2.
77. Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture, 1–6. See also Azimi, “Prisoners of Sex,” 3 and Amr Shalakany's discussion of the approach adopted by Human Rights Watch in consultation with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, “On a Certain Queer Discomfort with Orientalism,” Proceedings of the American Society of International Law 101 (2007), at http://www.aucegypt.edu/academics/dept/law/faculty/Documents/PROCEEDINGS.pdf (accessed September 4, 2009), 3–4.
78. Bahgat, “Explaining Egypt's Targeting of Gays.” See also Shalakany, “On a Certain Queer Discomfort,” 4–5.
79. See Shalakany, “On a Certain Queer Discomfort.”
80. Josh Kaplan, “The Transnational Human Rights Movement and States of Emergency in Israel/Palestine” in Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects, ed. Saskia Sassen (New York: Routledge, 2007), 287.
81. Massad, “Re-orienting Desire,” 382.
82. Accounts of men interviewed by Human Rights Watch reveal that some men were not invested in, or aware of, gay identity. See Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture, 4, 10–11.
83. Massad, “Re-orienting Desire,” 384.
84. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.
85. See Carl F. Stychin, A Nation by Rights: National Cultures, Sexual Identity Politics and the Discourse of Rights (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998).
86. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
87. See Shalakany, “On a Certain Queer Discomfort.”
88. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 281 (emphasis in original).
89. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 5.
90. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” in Human Rights, Human Wrongs: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2001, ed. Nicholas Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 169.
91. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” in Human Rights, Human Wrongs: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2001, ed. Nicholas Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 169.
92. Talal Asad, “Conscripts of Western Civilization,” in Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond, ed. Christine Ward Gailey (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1992), 337.
93. Talal Asad, “Conscripts of Western Civilization,” in Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond, ed. Christine Ward Gailey (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1992), 340–1.