Al-Ahram: Fathers of men

In his review of Joseph Massad's Desiring Arabs, Eric Walberg provides yet another angle to look at the admixture of sexuality, identity, politics and imperialism. Although the perspective is different, the ideas contained in this article, Insert Zionist Phallus, Achieve Orgasm, and The Zionism of Gay Politics are all interrelated and interconnected.

Because I tend to use the lens of Eastern European and Jewish studies, I could argue that to some degree the ostyidish population migrating westward intellectually colonized Central European, Western European, and North American notions of sexuality, and then European imperialists mentally colonized the Arab and Muslim world with the notions of the Gay International, the Regenderization Movement or die Umgeschlechtungsbewegung.

This double colonization process could be contrasted with the evolution of concepts of political sexual identity in former Soviet territories from which ideas of regenderization have been excluded until quite recently.

Fathers of men

Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs, University of Chicago Press, 2007

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Illuminated miniature of Shah Abbas I (1571-1629) of Persia, embracing his wine boy

The Western "civilising" project in its many guises has given rise to strange bedfellows. Not only do Christian and Islamic fundamentalists -- officially enemies of each other -- find common cause in demanding more public displays of religiosity and less liberal social policies regarding sex. In fact, as Joseph Massad shows in his new book, Desiring Arabs, both parties -- again, paradoxically, as enemies of the international gay movement -- actually work in tandem with that very movement, aiding in the process of defining people according to the Western paradigm of heterohomo sexual categories, which, prior to the 19th century, did not even exist.

This is the central thesis in Massad's controversial study, which surveys Arab social history as constructed by Arab scholars and writers themselves from the 19th century on, heavily influenced by Western thought and research methods.

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