Jody week 9 Naber

In Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism, Naber (2012) criticizes Anthropology’s construction of “culture” in diasporic communities in the U.S. as static and in opposition to a dynamic and modern American culture.  She rejects both Orientalism and reverse Orientalism for reifying cultural differences.  Naber calls for a multi-dimensional scholarship and multi-dimensional politics that refuses this reification and resists the pressure to subsume issues of gender and sexuality or to ignore internal politics.  This approach can be seen in her chapter four analysis of LAM, through the life stories of six women activists who participated in the organization.  By engaging in a critique of the “criss-crossing hierarchies” (191) in LAM, Naber shows how activist organizations tend to prioritize one political agenda at the expense of some of their members, but this engagement also acts as a critique of the politics of representation in scholarship.  Particularly when we study “our own,” there can be pressure from our communities and from ourselves to portray our interlocutors, or our communities in general, in a positive light, as culturally coherent and politically organized.  Simultaneously, there are disciplinary pressures to produce work that others in our field find relevant and appropriately scholarly.

In my own work right now I’m dealing with the ways that Grindr is both implicated in homonormativity and a tool for resisting it.  This resistance is mainly in the form of resisting imperatives of monogamy and sexual moderation.  There is a long history, particularly going back to the 1980’s and 1990’s and the response to the AIDS epidemic, of emphasizing the ability of queers to be capable of “stable” relationships and “healthy” sexual practices.  However, there is also a strand of academic research, particularly in Sociology but also in Public Health, that investigates gay men’s sexual “deviance.”  Academics outside of sexualities studies tend to consume this research in a voyeuristic way.  Studies of gay sexuality that do not either engage with this sensationalism, or directly refute stereotypes of gay promiscuity, are seen as less interesting and less relevant.

How then, do I explain the use of Grindr and similar apps as a way for gay couples to find “a third,” either for a one time hookup or an ongoing sexual relationship?  On the one hand, I feel an urge to stress that the two couples I interviewed have a strong, stable relationship, and that finding other men to sleep with them strengthens their relationship.  But this seems one dimensional and somewhat forced.  Why must I account for their non-monogamy in a way that normalizes it?  What might an account of this queer use of the app—a use that I consider to be a resistance to homonormativity, but not necessarily a challenge to queer liberalism—look like?  What if I include the fact that some of the apps now include a feature to link your profile to your partner’s, so that potential hookups can easily view the profiles of both people in the couple?  Depending on the audience, I may be creating salacious accounts for voyeurism, or I may be giving an account of queer resistance that substantiates some people’s belief that non-normative sexual practices are inherently incompatible with queer liberalism.  Neither of these is the account I want to give.

Questions for class:

Naber’s work is a move toward “rearticulating Arabness beyond Orientalism or reverse Orietalism,” (9).  How can our research be part of a “rearticulation” of culture that challenges and exceeds binaries