‘Gays who cannot properly be gay’: Queer Muslims in the neoliberal European city

Abstract

The article traces the framing of Muslim Europeans as the continent's Other by focusing on the silencing of queer Muslims within public debates around 'Islam and homosexuality'. Ignoring class as a factor in the violence produced by the gentrification of urban spaces, the pitting of the (implicitly white) gay community against the (implicitly straight) Muslim community posits the latter as a threat to the continent's foundations that needs to be contained through forms of spatial governance in line with the neoliberal restructuring of the city. Maintaining that this is a Europe-wide phenomenon, the article looks at Amsterdam as exemplifying the European metropole as a site of pseudo-homophile Islamophobia. Simultaneously, with activist groups like the queer of color collective Strange Fruit, it is also representative of the strategies of resistance developed by groups whose presence is virtually erased through culture clash discourses, namely queer Muslims. The article argues that an intersectional queer of color activism, as practiced by Strange Fruit, and a queer of color critique building on it, allows to undermine binaries from the Muslim/European dichotomy to the normative coming out narrative, invariably positioning queers of color as 'not properly gay'.

Integrationen och arbetets marknad: Hur jämställdhet, arbete och annat "svenskt" görs av arbetsförmedlare och privata aktörer

“…Dock sker det homonationella projektet på bekostnad av att "dom" som inte anses dela nationens mer progressiva syn på kön och rättigheter för homosexuella utesluts (Puar 2007, Lentin & Titley 2011. En tydlig sådan utveckling syns i Nederländerna och Australien där islamofoba politiska reformer rättfärdigas genom argument om en kamp för homosexuellas rättigheter (El-Tayeb 2012). I en svensk kontext syns detta genom att rasistiska partier, som Sverigedemokraterna, som inte hållit en hög profil i hbtq-frågor tidigare nu börjat tala om rättigheter för homosexuella som ett "svenskt" värde som hotas av islam och framför allt av det de påstår vara "homofoba invandrare" från muslimska länder.…”

‘Saving Muslim queer women from Muslim hetero-patriarchy’. Savior narratives in LGBTI youth work

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Welcoming the World? Hospitality, Homonationalism, and the London 2012 Olympics

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