On the Chronopolitics of Skin-ego: Antiblackness, Desire and Identification in Bravo TV's Shahs of Sunset

Abstract

In the third season of Bravo TV's Shahs of Sunset (2013-14), gay Iranian-American reality television personality Reza Farahan makes a curious analogy when he caricatures flamboyantly queer guest star Sasha Salehi as black. Reza associates what he perceives as sexual depravity with racial blackness, Iargue, to distance himself from Sasha in time. This essay thus enumerates Reza's homophobic antiblackness as a means by which he curates the imago of a right kind of modern or postmodern Iranian gay. I intervene in the epistemic break brokered by Enlightenment philosophy, which shifts human features from an anatomical to a physiognomical model of difference-a physiognomical model notably tasks the material skin with signifying the spatialization of time, for example, in racial schemas-to elaborate sociogenic psychic processes that distribute and arrange desire and identification. Like Frantz Fanon, who rubs up against white flesh so that it might rub off on him, Reza's is a sexuality of the surfaces in which he seeks white touch to negate the racial schemas that atavistically hail him. I therefore contextualize Fanonian psychoanalysis in/as critical race theory to argue that interracial meetings of bodies and secretions and intimacies level surface topographies to generate one condition of possibility for the "occult" self-invention Fanon prescribes, for black and nonblack persons of color alike.On the Chronopolitics of Skin-ego "If we want to understand the racial situation psychoanalytically, not from a universal viewpoint, but as it is experienced by individual consciousness, considerable importance must be given to sexual phenomena." "Is there in fact any difference between one racism and another? Don't we encounter the same downfall, the same failure of man?" "The problem considered here is one of time." -Frantz Fanon [1] [1] In a March 2012 interview with The Daily Beast, gay Iranian-American reality television personality Reza Farahan names his type: "the whiter, the better." [2] Tehran born and Tehrangeles bred, [3] Reza is a successful real estate agent with a sizeable hipster mustache (one with its own Twitter account), vigilant skin care and hair removal regimens, and an expensive penchant for designer labels and gold jewelry.He is adept at performing respectability politics for a white gaze and, in the third season, caricaturesIranian queers who don't perform respectability as black. While the first season of Bravo TV's Shahs of Sunset pivots on co-star GG's volatile personality, including her curious collection of guns and knives, and the second season on the emotional abuse co-star MJ withstands from her mother, the third season (2013-14) spotlights Reza's "gay rage," which the show juxtaposes to Reza's gay love: Adam Neely.This essay intervenes in what the show narrativizes, and a clinical psychologist trained in Oedipal but not Fanonian psychoanalysis misdiagnoses as "gay rage," to suggest that Reza's is the culmination and release of cathected energies triggered by racial and not sexual prosc...