Re-Orienting Desire

          This is Niya. While reading Joseph Massad’s Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World I was fascinated by his argument. The difficulty of the gay rights in Arab nations is, as he presents, not as simple as Western media assumes. He argues through many examples how the gay rights movement in Arab nations is quite different from the struggles throughout the United States.

Many problems lie within the advocacy of Gay International, a term used by Massad to collectively describe the organizations that seek, often through misguided attempts, to advance the human rights of the gay and lesbian community. These organizations, he argues are abundant with European and Western white men hoping to erase the oppression of gay men in these countries. Their lack of proper research and historical and social understanding of these countries often works counterintuitive to their mission. The first of the issues Massad highlights is the understanding, or rather misunderstanding of language in Muslim countries. Many of these organizations commonly use the term homosexual and homosexuality to describe same sex sex-acts in these countries. However, these words do not have the same definition for the men and women in Arab nations. For them, the act of formalized homosexuality is quite unnerving. Even historians, it seems, have taken a small portion of time and used it to blanket discusses decades of social history. This body of literature, so deeply founded in historians without a proper background inevitably leads to years of misunderstanding. The issue of sexual desire is essentially a statement about ones allegiance to the families, their religion, and in some cases their personal level of nationalism.

Gay International, Massad argues, works to “produce homosexuals […] where they do not exist, and repress same sex desires and practices that refuse to be assimilated into its sexual epistemology” (363). Their work is not liberating, so much as it confronting these men with a Western dichotomy and forcing them to alter their self-ideas into this system. Massad however does not simply push his personal agenda throughout his article. He cites author Rex Wockner who looked into the similar issue. Wockner questioned whether this Western sexual model was helping to spotlight gay men desperately in need of salvation or simply underscoring the reality that humans are “by nature bisexual”.

Throughout Massad’s argument, I found that the organizations considered Gay International imagined themselves to be saviors of a highly oppressed people. This narrow-minded approach was in fact forcing men and women to confront multiple Western assumptions, and then their own nation’s prejudice. These complications seem so basic it is astounding that they have lasted for so long. These advocates disassociate themselves from the land and the people, yet still consider their work effective. The multiple cases, which highlight mistranslations and errors in understanding, show that very few people have a complete truthful understanding of homosexual life in Muslim nations. Without this working knowledge, it is impossible to imagine these organizations truly enact social and political change. This application of the Western sexual model to other areas, is failing the mission.