Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: WHAT CAN "CRITICAL secularism studies" (Kemerli 2019) offer to queer studies and vice versa?This contribution to a queer vocabulary for the 2020s is a critique of queer secularity and its accompanying queer collusions with (Western) modalities of secularism, namely how it upholds secular modes of being as normative queer subjecthood.If we are to seriously undertake queer studies' project of queerness-as-approach, a political positioning which interrogates normativities (Browne and Nash 2016) rather than a narrow focus on sexual and gender identities, how can this project challenge the normativity of Western secular ideals?Can queer theory confront the workings of secularity in homo normativity and its resulting homonationalist deployments?How can critical secularism studies contend with the instrumentalisation of queerness in the name of secularism?I pose these questions with Jasbir Puar's discussion of queer secularity in mind, a concept discussed in Terrorist Assemblages (2007) as illustrative of Western Sexual Exceptionalism."Western Sexual Exceptionalism" (Puar 2007) is a particular formation of exceptionalism that frames the West as exceptionally tolerant to homosexuality in comparison to the Rest of The World.Its work is two-fold: the West is situated as permissive (indeed, welcoming) of LGBTQI+ identity, practices, and community, and the "West's Others" (Hall 2011) are seen as lagging behind in resisting these rights via their (allegedly inherent) sexual repression and attendant homophobia.This exceptionalism functions in locating the homo phobia
Source: lambda nordica
DOI: 10.34041/ln.v25.626
Author: Abeera Khan
Language: English
Topic: Gender and Feminist Studies
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4213029233