Re: [A-List] Khomeini on Sodomy

["Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 9/25/07, Macdonald Stainsby <mstainsby@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > On 10/25/07, Macdonald Stainsby <mstainsby@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > The idea of sexual orientations is culturally and historically
> > contingent.  The Japanese people enjoyed same-sex sex, especially
> > between older men and younger men, and such same-sex sex was
> > celebrated in premodern literature, in which no modern categories of
> > homosexuals, bisexuals, and heterosexuals could be found.  That's all
> > long before the rise of modern gay rights movements.  Homophobia in
> > Japan was an import from the West, which came as a byproduct of
> > psychiatry, psychology, and related sciences, which also propagated
> > the idea of sexual orientations.
>
> That is all well and good, because the idea that sexuality needs no labels
> and definitions is that starting point. That starting point doesn't exist
> in Iran.

In Iran (as well as the rest of the now predominantly Islamic world),
too, for a very long time (before and after the advent of Islam), the
dominant idea of sexuality was rather like that in Japan: celebration
of same-sex love without the discourse of sexual orientations.  So,
they, too, have indigenous cultural resources to turn to, to develop a
new sexual discourse for their struggle.

> Saying that gay people do not exist, in the way you are spinning it, is
> Ahmadinejad protecting queer people from the categorization of anti-human
> prejudice. Nonsense.

I never implied any such thing.  That's your projection.  What I said
was his opinion does not differ from that of the majority of Iranians.

That said, if the Iranian people adopted the discourse of sexual
orientations en masse, following the Western model of psychologization
of sexuality, the initial effects would be probably not liberation but
more trouble for those who have same-sex sex.

In any case, here in the West, we have notions of sexual orientations
firmly implanted in our lives.  But does that mean I, a bisexual
person, have a lot in common with most other bisexual persons and want
to have a community based on this one fact?  No.  In my case, as well
as in cases of those who are not deeply interested in identity
politics for one reason or another, I'd rather have community based on
_class interests and (more importantly) political orientations_, not
on sexual orientation alone.  Cheney's daughter Mary is queer, Barney
Frank is queer, I am queer -- there's little in common among us.
-- 
Yoshie