I’m reading through papers, books and reports related to queerness, the environment, and occasionally other topics. As I read, I’m taking notes so I can refer back to my old readings and remember their key points more easily. Why not post my notes here, so you can all learn with me?

The bulk of the article will be a summary of the reading, and will then end with my thoughts. Square brackets throughout the summary indicate comments from me.

Ali, M., A. (2017). Un-Mapping Gay Imperialism: A Postcolonial Approach To Sexual Orientation-Based Development. Reconsidering Development, 5(1), 1-20. Retrieved from https://pubs.lib.umn.edu/index.php/reconsidering/article/view/907

Introduction

• Africa was carved up by Europeans in a conference room in 1884 in what would become known as The Scramble for Africa. Today, Africa’s fate is still decided in conference rooms in the West and international organisations “under the guise of development and humanitarianism”.
• Western social causes (women’s rights, lesbian and gay movements, NGOs) have been used to justify imperial intervention and domination. This paper specifically looks at the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA).
• In 2015, ILGA put out its annual report titled State Sponsored Homophobia: A World Survey of Laws: Criminalization, Protection, and Recognition of Same-Sex Love. It looks at how governments around the world make laws about the queer community.
  • The report colour codes the world based on whether they protect (green), recognise (yellow) or persecute (red) queer people.
  • This is another example of Africa being mapped out and negotiated around Western conference tables, this time with a focus on sexuality and human rights. The author chose the 2015 report as it includes reflections on 10 years of work.
  • The number of countries criminalising same-sex sexual acts dropped from 92 to 76 over the preceding 10 years.
  • ILGA applauds its successes and issues a call to action in the report. Organisations, institutions, and governments could use it to lobby and advocate for laws that protect lesbian and gay people around the world.
• This paper “deconstructs the ways in which imperial desires and racism permeate homophobia and anti-homophobia discourses as well as lesbian and gay human rights discourses”. It focuses on Somalia, as the author is Somali and has lived and worked there in both government and non-profit areas.
  • How are Somali people constructed within these discourses and ILGA’s depiction of the world?
  • Where did these homophobic laws come from?
  • How are human rights discourses used to push Western ideologies onto other nations, and silence Others?
  • What about sexually fluid people who do not fall under the lesbian/gay or homosexual/heterosexual binaries?
• “ILGA’s report and map are part of a project of imperialism masked under cloaks of human rights and (anti)homophobia activism.”
  • “ILGA enforces a sexuality grounded in Western epistemology.”
  • “As a result, all Other forms of sexuality and sexual practices are marginalized and cast as ‘pre-modern’, ‘barbaric’, ‘savage’ and ‘un-liberated’.”
  • ILGA’s map of state-sponsored homophobia is a temporal device used to affirm difference as distance. This results in the people of Somalia being placed behind states with laws recognising and protecting lesbian and gay people. 
  • The work of ILGA therefore furthers the cause of Orientalism, used to create distance between “progressive West/Occident or the developed states from the homophobic East/Orient or developing/Third World Other.”
  • “Temporal distancing is essential for the operation and justification of ILGA’s development work.”
  • “ILGA’s use of temporality in their anti-homophobia and human rights development work is powerful because it taps into a racializing narrative upon which the history of colonization has been built.”
• “I employ the method of document analysis and analytical strategy of critical discourse analysis (CDA) situated within a postcolonial theoretical framework to deconstruct ILGA’s mapping of the world and to challenge colonial legacies ingrained within these discourses. This project of un-mapping is divided into six sections.”
  • First section: Outlines the methodology and theoretical framework guiding this study.
  • Second section: Overview of the ILGA report with a focus on Somalia. Exploration of the origin of the Somali Penal Code and how the West contributed to its homophobia.
  • Third section: Exploration of the Western socio-political climate that gave rise to gay imperialism, using Puar’s (2007) concepts of homonationalism and the homonational subject. “I argue that the homonational subject engaging sexual orientation-based development initiatives is participating in gay imperialism.”
  • Fourth section: “I un-map ILGA’s cartography of same-sex laws to expose the use of temporal distancing and its implication in their development initiatives.” This section also contains a postcolonial critique of ILGA’s mapping project, and examines how the map is used to further Other the former colonies shown on the map.
  • Fifth section: An examination of the ways in which gay imperialism is justified by NGOs, who claim to be fighting homophobic laws.
    • [Homophobic laws that are there because of imperialists.]
  • Sixth section: “[M]oves beyond deconstructing the work of ILGA to explore the complexities and multi-dimensions of sexuality as an effort to begin to find new ways to discuss and understand sexualities.”

Framing the Study: Methodology and Theoretical Framework

• The choice in what does and doesn’t get documented is a show of power. Reports and documents are socially produced outputs that give weight and validation to whatever it is they’re reporting on or documenting. “These processes are about imposing control and order on transactions, events, people and societies through the legal, symbolic, structural and operational power of recorded communication.”
  • “[D]ocuments are not just the bearer of historical content and information; “they are also a reflection of the needs and desires of its creator”.”
  • “The process of documenting certain stories and information (and not others) is an act of power.”
• Power is performative. “Power must be analyzed as something that circulates and is never achieved”. We need to examine and critique the language underpinning documents and records. This paper will be doing this for the ILGA 2015 report.
• It is important to not just study the content of the documents. We also need to study the discourses and context that produced them, as well as what they’re used for.
• Discourse and power go hand in hand. Power controls the production of discourse, which in turn influences the implementation of ideas and how people are regulated. Discourses can also limit how a topic is discussed, or how we act.
• Examined the ILGA report on three levels, as defined in Fairclough (1989):
  • Micro-level: The writing itself; syntax and rhetorical devices.
  • Meso-level: The report’s production and consumption, to draw out power relations.
  • Macro-level: The socio-political climate surrounding the report.
• “In addition, it offers an analysis that exposes the links between the text and the masked power relations operating by means of discursive practices based on which the report is produced.”
• This paper will use a postcolonial theoretical framework. This “allows for an unraveling of colonial and Eurocentric discourses”, including those of human rights and (anti)homophobia. This framework recognises that global power structures have not meaningfully shifted from the end of the imperial era. It “is concerned with the colonial history and the extent that that history has determined the configurations of power structures of the present.”
• “Lesbian and gay development work cannot be separated from other international development initiatives that mask imperial impulses, and the racism ingrained in discourses of human rights, equality and progress.”
  • The ILGA report uses imagery and text to “reproduce, sustain and circulate human rights and (anti)homophobia discourses situated in Western epistemologies, Orientalists discourses and international development paradigms.”
• The Other and Orient do not exist in and of themselves. They are constructed by Westerners in opposition to themselves; the Self or the Occident. Their entire identity is an act of Othering. Postcolonial theory allows us to deconstruct this Self / Other binary to see the complexities and nuances within people. Taking this approach to the ILGA report complicates ILGA’s binaries of anti-homophobic/homophobic and progressive/regressive. “I utilize these frameworks to provide a critique of sexual orientation-based development as gay imperialism.”
• We must do more than simply deconstruct power dynamics and colonial legacies, as that simply adds to more discourse about them. We also need to look at alternatives, which is why this report’s final section explores Indigenous and local knowledges on sexualities that are left out.

ILGA and Somalia: Tracing Colonial Laws

• “According to ILGA, “The State Sponsored Homophobia report originated from the need to present a concise overview of the legal situation of lesbian and gay people around the world”.”
  • The report does not give us an idea of the day to day lives of lesbian and gay people and communities around the world. It contains a global overview of laws based on categories.
  • ILGA praises itself in the report and argues that its work has contributed to 16 countries dropping homosexual criminality over the preceding 10 years.
  • ILGA says the report is supposed to open our eyes to the lived realities of lesbian and gay people around the world are still criminalised in over 75 countries around the world. The report reminds us of the importance of combating homophobia.
  • The report notes that same-sex sexual acts are legal in 19 African states and illegal in 34. For Somalia, it quotes the Somali Penal Code, which is still in effect in Somaliland, Puntland, and central and south Somalia. Specifically, Article 409:
    • “Whoever has carnal intercourse with a person of the same sex shall be punished, where the act does not constitute a more serious crime, with imprisonment from three months to three years. Where the act committed is an act of lust different from carnal intercourse, the punishment imposed shall be reduced by one-third. (Carroll & Itaborahy, 2015, p. 63)”
• The Somali Penal Code came about after the merging of the British and Italian Somaliland colonies. It replaced the Italian Penal Code of 1930 and the Indian Penal Code of 1860 in favour of a unified set of laws. The Italian code did not mention homosexuality; Section 377 of the British Indian one did:
  • “Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.”
  • Section 377 remains in place in many former colonies.
  • “It is no coincidence that Article 409 of the Somali Penal Code is worded similarly to this British colonial law–this article reflects and is influenced by the Indian Penal Code.”
  • ILGA ignores the history of the Somali Penal Code, making it sound like Article 409 was a law created by the Somali people, rather than a legacy of colonialism. The report’s maps and text make Somalia look like a homophobic state that persecutes lesbian and gay people, while making Britain and Italy, the progenitors of the law, seem gay-friendly.
  • “According to ILGA “we can no longer blame bad laws on colonialism alone””
    • [WOW this line infuriates me.]
    • This allowed ILGA to blame Somalia wholly for the law, and make it seem as if homophobia is part of Somali culture.
• This paper does not argue that discrimination against same-sex sexual acts doesn’t exist in Somalia. Rather, it is asking why ILGA wrote about Somalia in this way.
  • What does ILGA gain from neglecting the colonial origins and historical context of Article 409?
  • What is the purpose of providing an overview of laws regarding lesbian and gay identified people?
  • What is missed in this documentation?

White Queers Saving Brown/Black Queers from Brown/Black Culture: From Homonationalism to Gay Imperialism

• White saviour rhetoric has been used throughout history to justify Western imperialism, as they claim to protect women from those cultures even as they destroy them (and, incidentally, the women they claim to save). The title of this section invokes that dynamic; it is heroics used to mask imperialism.
• Western countries criminalised and pathologised homosexual people until recently. They are now claiming to be on the side of lesbian and gay people. This is homonationalism – “the national inclusion of homosexuality and homosexual bodies”.
• Homonationalism extended to international development becomes gay imperialism. “As a result, ILGA’s report produces an understanding of the world comprised of ‘enlightened’ homonational subjects and Others.”
• Participating in imperialism legitimises lesbian and gay people in Western culture. It helps them to view themselves as Occidents and everyone else as Other.
• The homonational lesbian / gay Western person wants a world where their sexual categories and desires are safe. This is evident in ILGA’s enforcement of Western methods of understanding gender and sexuality, as opposed to listening to local communities; it instead labels them as barbaric and unliberated.
• Lesbian and gay Western people engaging in gay imperialism are usually white. They are able to move away from their marginalised gay identification to be part of the broader white supremacist culture. By engaging in this imperialism, they are able to gain legitimacy by marking themselves as different from the Other.
• White homonationals are out of emancipatory currency in Western politics. By engaging in imperialism, they are able to get into the “old boys club” of mainstream politics that is rescuing the Other from their own culture.
• ILGA’s underpinning logic is that former colonies are incapable of protecting same-sex sexual practices without assistance from the West.
• Lesbian and gay rights have become a hallmark of modernity. ILGA’s report plays into traditional “civilised” and “uncivilised” discourse by describing many states as complicit in the hate and repression of human rights.

Mapping the World Through Temporal Distancing

• Maps are a tool of colonialism that precede and legitimise conquests of land. They claim to capture some truth, and the owner of the map is then considered an expert over that land with a controlling claim. When ILGA maps lesbian and gay criminalisation, it stakes its claim over expertise on sexuality throughout most of the world, especially the red and yellow shades.
• Maps allow colonisers to navigate a world filled with terrifying ambiguities. “Creating narratives of the people and land is both a method of domination and a way for the Western subject to know itself.” The shades of the map coloured green represent the ideal Occident, to which the red Orient must strive to be considered modern. Here, ILGA uses the authority granted by its map to call the Somali Other inferior and backwards.
  • [ILGA made the map itself and then used it to justify its superiority… That’s circular logic.]
• Denial of coevalness, as defined in Fabians Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, is “a persistent and systemic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse”. “Fabian argues that the role of anthropology is to provide a temporal distance between those observed and the observer.”
  • ILGA’s map places Somalia and its people as operating in a sense of time before the West.
• I’m copying the whole final paragraph of this section because it’s a banger: “Similar to anthropology, the function of international development work is to provide a temporal distance between those that are ‘developed’ and those that are ‘developing’. This is insinuated in the terms ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ –those that are ‘developing’ are attempting to catch up to or inhabit the temporal space of the ‘developed’. In this context, the ‘developed’ are the states with laws that recognize and protect lesbian and gay rights and those that need to develop are the states that have homophobic laws or no laws protecting lesbian and gay people. ILGA’s map of state sponsored homophobia is thus a temporal device used to affirm difference as distance. The people of Somalia are cast as frozen in time, occupying a temporal space behind that of states considered to have recognition and protection of lesbian and gay rights. This denial of coevalness is part of the racist narrative used in ‘white savior’ rhetoric to justify past colonization and current interventions in states considered ‘too weak’ and ‘too far’ behind to help themselves.”

(Anti)Homophobia and Racist Discourses

• ILGA’s mapping project excludes the historical context behind the yellow and red. In doing this, it lays all the blame for homophobia at the feet of the people in those “persecution” states, with no blame shared with the Western countries who wrote those laws. This causes the people of the former colonies to be cast as regressive, and it constructs the idea of the “enlightened” Western lesbian and/or gay person.
• Western imperialism and colonialism are reinforced by binaries, which in turn produce hierarchies; one half of a given binary will always be preferred. In this case, those binaries are anti-homophobic/homophobic, progressive/regressive, civilised/uncivilised, homosexual/heterosexual. ILGA’s work reinforces these binaries, which are central to the Western imperialism project.
• LGBT studies often claim racialised people are trapped within primitive and pathological communities. The modern subject can only exist in opposition to the racialised Other [object] trapped in uncivilised cultures. ILGA’s report reinforces this mindset. It also constructs its red and yellow states as heteronormative and heterosexual. This allows Western states to describe themselves as modern, and champions of human rights.
• ILGA did not look into the origins of these homophobic laws or whether they are enforced. They hold up the legalisation of same-sex marriage as the ideal and refuse any nuance. The nuance could be the level of enforcement of homophobic laws (assumed to always be stringently enforced) and the amount of homophobia present in countries where same-sex marriage exists. ILGA’s refusal to acknowledge the similarity between states based on racialised narratives of difference and distance add to the foundation of colonisation and imperialism.
  • “Gay marriage, which is less about gay rights and more about codifying a European value”
    • [Lots of different ways to be supportive or harmful to queer people. Having legal rights doesn’t mean homophobia disappears.]
• ILGA appropriates intersectional thinkers while attempting to negate the imperialism in their work.
  • [They used Audre Lorde’s “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we don’t live single-issue lives” as part of their imperialist project. Oooooo this pisses me off.]
• While the report quotes Audre Lorde, it fails to take an intersectional approach. 3.8% of the report discusses intersectionality specifically, and then doesn’t use an intersectional framing anywhere else. The report fails to take an intersectional approach by ignoring the historical context and colonial influences of homophobia in Africa. It also doesn’t take into account languages, cultures and lived experiences of people in the countries it maps.
• “[T]he report’s framework and objectives must be rethought and recast to explore the multi-dimensions and intricacies of sexuality and gender and the actual impact of same-sex laws on people lives.”

Sexualities in the Margins: Moving Beyond ILGA

• ILGA’s embrace of binaries leaves out sexualities that do not fit these narrow definitions. It acts as if lesbian and gay sex were founded and developed by the West. It then uses this to construct a narrative of the “enlightened” West and “those in the states that criminalize homosexuality as faceless victims without agency”.
• Different languages have different ways of referring to different sexualities. ILGA’s definition fails to account for other ways of being, and universalises the Western conception of being non-heterosexual. It foists these Western definitions onto the rest of the world and refuses to acknowledge the myriad ways heterosexual non-conformity may present across the world. “People who refuse to assimilate into the Western understanding of sexuality enforced by ILGA are relegated to the margins. ILGA’s work dismisses as well as represses same-sex desires and practices that are not identity-based.”
• There is an example of women in Suriname who “considered their sexuality as a verb [Mati] rather than a noun” and rejected Western labels as they came with unwanted baggage. These women had sex with men, women, or both, but did not fit within ILGA’s narrow definition. For more, you can see Gloria Wekker’s book, The Politics of Passion.
• In the Philippines, there men, called bakla, who “engage in practices that encompass effeminacy, trans-sexuality, and sexual fluidity”. Once again, they are excluded by ILGA because they do not match Western definitions. You can read more in Manalansan’s 2003 paper, In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma.
• The Somali language doesn’t have a general word for same-sex sexual acts of relationships; men who have sex with men are understood as khaniis and women who have sex with women are considered khaniisad. People who engage in these activities have always been around; they just never had a label nor tried to put people into simplistic categories. “This would be unfathomable to ILGA as Western colonization and imperialism relies on categorizing, labeling, and carving out regions, people, and cultures as part of mechanisms of control.”
• “The bakla, khaniis, khaniisad, makhnood, mati work, and label-less sexualities exist outside Western identity-based categories and may not rely on the homosexual/heterosexual binary. These understandings of sexuality complicate the ‘liberated’ sexuality presented by ILGA. In addition, they trouble dominant discourses that marginalize Indigenous knowledges and sexualities.”

Conclusion

• ILGA’s mapping is a colonising project that imposes Western binaries onto countries where they don’t fit. It ignores ambiguities, nuance, and lived experiences. It serves to construct Western, coloniser countries as ‘civilised’, ‘enlightened’ and ‘modern’ while castigating the Other.
• “ILGA’s work constructs Western states as the embodiment of development and progress for all Other states to measure themselves against.” It racialises the states coloured in red and places them in a temporal space behind the West. This report does more than just review laws; it is viewed as educational and can affect how people view themselves, their communities and their country or other countries.
• ILGA’s report hampers development work because of its orientalism and the way it reinforces the binary logic of colonisation.
• ILGA’s narrow definition of sexuality means it misses non-heteronormative sexualities and sexual relations that do not fit into the narrow Western categories of lesbian or gay. “In order to move beyond ILGA and hegemonic epistemologies and discourses on sexuality, gender and sexuality must be decolonized and embraced as complex, ambiguous, and multi-dimensional.”

My Thoughts

I always love a writer who mentions Edward Said.

The introduction pulled me right in and made me excited to read the whole paper. With most papers I read, I’m interested, but this one was on another level. Not only was it a fascinating topic, but I’m always keen to hear from people who are not from the West, and this is someone who has had a lot of experience dealing with Western bullshit. It was immediately clear I was going to learn a lot from this. I read one section at a time, as I normally do when reading as I like to let things sit and digest. What was unusual was that for this paper, I read a section every day consecutively till I was done, and even read two sections in one day (with a few hours in between. In short, I found this an awesome read.

I was particularly interested in getting to the part about how Western colonialism influenced the creation of homophobic laws. This isn’t talked about enough, or understood by, mainstream Western media, politicians, or society as a whole. That many of the issues African nations are condemned for – debt, anti-democratic values, human rights abuses, homophobic laws – are simply carrying forward what colonial states did to African countries.

Global power structures have not shifted meaningfully since the end of the colonial era – I’m not sure I’ve seen it put so plainly before. But the author is right. Power controls the discourses we have access to, which in turn shapes power. And reports like ILGA’s here make sure Western colonial powers retain their power and ability to shape discourse. ILGA’s “we can no longer blame bad laws on colonialism alone” bullshit plays into this. The author acknowledges that there is homophobia within and amongst Somali people, and is also 100% correct to point out colonial influences. It is wrong for ILGA and others in the West to ignore the role our governments have played in the past, by introducing laws and mindsets that have carried forward into the present. I’m wary of falling into the trap of idolising non-Western cultures, but it’s frustrating to hear centrists and liberals condemn human rights abuses in colonial states without acknowledging the harm we did.

I’m a bit confused by the paragraph on Somali sexualities. The article gives us two words for same-sex acts, and then says the language has no specific label for them? I’m guessing the author means there’s no overarching label for same-sex sex / relationships as a whole? They just have those vague gendered terms…?

This was an outstanding paper that I think I’m going to keep coming back to, and will send to a lot of my friends.