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How Non-Heterosexual Muslims in London

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How Non-Heterosexual Muslims in London “Qu(e)’erying the Qur’an:” How non-heterosexual Muslims in London articulate sexual citizenship narratives By Sydney Sheedy Submitted to: Central European University Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Sociology and Social Anthropology Supervisor: Dorit Geva Budapest, Hungary CEU eTD Collection 2016 ABSTRACT This thesis aims to situate the phenomenon of “homonationalism” into lived experience in order to lay bare the contextual specificities of queer Muslim subjectivites in London, UK and to examine the local refigurations of power that informants enact therein. Through fieldwork at an inclusive Mosque in London, and interviews with queer- identifying Muslims, this ethnographic approach is dedicated to analyzing how those considered inauthentic in homonationalist imaginaries, and who are often elided in critical discourses of homonationalism itself, articulate narratives of sexual citizenship that challenge the regulatory codes of a universalizing script of homonormative sexuality, and how they make these pleas for belonging through a parallel reconstitution of Muslim normativities. I argue that examining homonationalism through sexual citizenship narratives captures the local navigations of power while still addressing how these micrological performances garner meaning in transnational networks of Muslim and queer belonging, and such an approach is useful in exposing how citizenship emerges as much through narrative iterations as do the categories of “Muslim” and “queer” that informants differently affirm and alter. CEU eTD Collection 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction____________________________________________________________4 Theoretical grounding_____________________________________________ 6 The UK context___________________________________________________9 Limitations to discourses of homonationalism_________________________13 Methodological and theoretical intervention__________________________14 Chapter 1: “Dialogues” _________________________________________________19 Political (in)correctness ___________________________________________19 Queer in conversation_____________________________________________24 Chapter 2: “Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are”______________________30 Receipe for coming out____________________________________________32 “We’re queer, but where is ‘here’?”_________________________________35 Shifting publics __________________________________________________37 Chapter 3: “Authorizing Interpretation in Scripture”________________________41 Authenticity_____________________________________________________41 Islam in context__________________________________________________47 Homonormativity amongst queer Muslims ___________________________53 Conclusion____________________________________________________________58 References ____________________________________________________________62 CEU eTD Collection 3 Introduction On April 23 2016, British-Pakistani Muslim student Maria Munir came out as gender non-binary to President Obama during a town hall Q&A in London. It was the first time they1 had publically declared their sexual identification, and they used the platform to ask the US President to “go beyond what has been accepted in the LGBTQ rights movement in including people who fit outside the social norms” (The Guardian 2016), citing the North Carolina anti-trans bathroom law as well as the lack of rights for nonbinary peoples in the UK. In a later interview with BBC, Munir admitted that they had not come out to their parents: “I just thought, if anyone in the world is going to accept me for who I am it should be the President of the United States”(Dawson & Morse 2016). Munir’s plea to Obama (and to the countless others who were present and read about it), took place during my fieldwork period in London with queer-identifying Muslims, and illuminates some of the central questions I was in the middle of investigating. What does it mean that a British person with a Pakistani-Muslim background chose to ‘come out’ to the President of a different country in order to shed light on issues that they experience in their own locale? How does their chosen audience shape how articulations about non-normative gender and sexual rights are made and what community they see themselves as a part of? While there has been a lot of discussion on the ethnocentrism and Islamophobia at CEU eTD Collection the heart of mainstream LGBT movements, the local navigations and experiences of the people at these intersections are often overlooked. This ethnographic account, detailing 1 Like many nonbinary-identifying people, Munir prefers the pronoun “they.” 4 interviews with queer Muslim residents of London, and my fieldwork at an inclusive Mosque, comprise a venture into situating sexualized nationalisms and their discontents into lived experience, which can illuminate specific dialogical strategies for bridging the increasingly tense relationship between the Muslim and LGBT communities2 in the UK. How do queer Muslims in the UK articulate sexual citizenship narratives? Who makes up the audience of these pleas to belonging, and in communicating such desires, what constitutes the appropriate speech through which to express claims to citizenship? Finally, how is the authority to construct such narratives negotiated and communicated, and at whose expense? Munir’s comment characterizes her as what Cossman (2007) would call a “border speaker:” a subject at the margins of a desired form of sexual citizenship whose speech acts either move the border or attempt to cross it (68). In rearticulating the borders of normative ‘Muslimness’ to include their own interpretations of sexual diversity, as well as interrogating the boundaries of normative queerness in the UK as racialized and secular, queer Muslims in London negotiate the contours of a narrative through which they can emerge as sexual citizens, disrupting the exlusionary binary of in/outside of the closet. Constructing personal chimeras of new language, queer Muslims not only enact border crossings, but necessarily reconstitute such borders elsewhere, as these professions of belonging are divested with their own norms that privilege some performances of being a queer Muslim over others. Only in situating studies of homonormative CEU eTD Collection nationalism in lived experience can one reveal the particular ways subjects unravel, 2 While there is not one homogenous community of either Muslims or LGBT peoples in the UK, the informants in this paper, seated at such intersections, often refer to these groups as such. 5 transverse, and re-erect boundaries in negotiations of authentic citizenship that give one the right to particular speech. Theoretical grounding Boundaries of belonging are always sexualized, and queer and feminist theorists have anguished over exposing heteronormativity as an exclusionary and imperative organization of bodies through which gender and sex performances are regulated and seen to cohere (see Rich 1980; Butler 1990; Warner 1993). Heternormativity’s regulatory modes dictate proper masculinities and femininities, through which bodies they should proliferate, and how they correlate with proper gender and sexual performance (Butler 1993; Connell 1999). More recently, discussions of a “homonormative turn” (Agathangelou 2008:123) in LGBT rights organizing addresses a marked shift whereby movements aimed at disruptiving this normalizing project instead seek inclusion within it (Collins 2009). Lisa Duggan (2002) introduced the idea of “homonormativity,” out of a neoliberal reading of sexual politics, in which she argues homonormativity “…does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a…privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (179). The LGBT movement as emergent out of the West has accrued many of its successes precisely through the adherence to such a script, CEU eTD Collection whereby, for example, lobbying for same-sex marriage rights often relies on the demonization of non-monogamous and non-privatized sexualities. This begs the question: “whose genders and sexualities gain value, visibilty, and universality, and whose are 6 patronized, particularized and marginalized in international LGBT rights “connectivities”? (Bacchetta & Haritaworn 2011:128). Agathangelou (2008) argues that “(normative) queerness might be offered incorporation into the parameters of citizenship…in exchange for closing [one’s] eyes to other kinds of violence committed daily on bodies of other queers, indigenous, black, and other people of color, the terrorists, and members of the working class”(126). The transnationalization of LGBT rights catapults these particular homonormativities into a narrative of modernity whereby those particular subjects who were unevenly incorporated into the body politic of some nations appoint themselves the universal referent for sexual emancipation. LGBT rights is not an inevitable progression of greater visibility for essential homosexual selves, as it is often imagined in international gay rights discourse, but is the result of as well as the dissemination of a narrative of universal queerness which is applied, sometimes forcibly, to disparate contexts regardless of class, race/ethnicity, religion, and nationalism (Altman 2001). The erection and maintenance of the boundaries of normative queerness is carried out based on a persistent
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