‘Turkish, Dutch, gay and proud’: Mapping out the contours of agency in homonationalist times

Abstract

In 2012 Amsterdam Gay Pride Canal Parade hosted a Turkish Boat, organized by Dutch citizens of Turkish decent. The newspaper articles consistently emphasized what an advancement this was for the Turkish migrants, considering their 'cultural background.' Simultaneously, public opinion on the former immigrants from Turkey and Morocco as intolerant towards LGBTI people and how they are 'gay bashing on the streets' was still present. The scholarship on homonationalism and gay imperialism has been dealing with questions of Orientalism, islamophobia and racism since the 2000s. The question of agency within this scholarship, however, was not dealt with extensively. This paper will engage with this question by mapping out Dutch homonationalism and focusing on how this specific context produces historically contingent subject positions-such as gay, lesbian, Muslim, Turkish or Moroccan-Dutch-that are hierarchized within the Dutch public sphere. None of them is innocent of power or neutral, the power configurations among these subject positions lay the ground of agency upon which the subject can act.

Inclusiones desiguales en Latinoamérica y Europa: homofobia y racismo bajo el prisma del homonacionalismo

“…La amplia producción científica que se desarrolla en Europa constata que es un centro de discursos homonacionalistas (Kehl, 2019;Fernández García, 2018;Ammaturo, 2015Ammaturo, , 2016Rexhepi, 2016;Hubbard y Wilkinson, 2015;Santos, 2013;Jivraj y Jong, 2011). En la discusión sobre homonacionalismo, los Países Bajos se han considerado vanguardia de derechos para gais y lesbianas, pero también la cuna de la cooptación del discurso de la diversidad sexual y de género por el Estado y la extrema derecha (Bracke, 2012;Jivraj y Jong, 2011;Mepschen, 2016;Puar, 2007;Yildiz, 2017).…”

Homonationalism in Europe? A Quantitative Comparison of the Values of Europeans

“…Some works are based on audiovisual analysis (Cherry, 2018;Szulc & Smets, 2015;Nebeling Petersen & Myong, 2015;MacCann, 2015), others on analysis of the press (Jungar & Peltonen, 2017;Travers & Shearman, 2017;Serykh, 2017). Some deal with pride parades and the LGBTQ+ and/or supporters' communities (Kehl, 2018;Yildiz, 2017;Szulc, 2016;Ammaturo, 2016;Rexhepi, 2016;Sadurní Balcells & Pujol Tarrés, 2015;Hubbard & Wilkinson, 2015;Kulpa, 2014a;Bracke, 2012;Jirvraj & de Jong, 2011) and urban spaces (Mepschen, 2016;Hubbard & Wilkinson, 2015).…”

“…LGBTQ+ for example in teacher education (Reimers, 2017), textbooks (Rothing & Svendsen, 2011) or sports (Travers & Shearman, 2017;Hubbard & Wilkinson, 2015;Bury, 2015), but also other policies in less delimited areas (Yildiz, 2017;Rexhepi, 2016;Mepschen, 2016;Hubbard & Wilkinson, 2015;Kulpa, 2014b;Santos, 2013).…”

Omar Mateen as US citizen, not foreign threat: Homonationalism and LGBTQ online representations of the Pulse nightclub shooting

“…Homonationalism serves to critique contemporary uses of gay rights that rely on and reproduce imperialistic practices, as Puar (2013a) developed the concept to draw attention to the ways in which nation states have increasingly positioned some nations and populations as “gay friendly,” and others as “homophobic,” to strengthen and naturalize global inequities (El-Tayeb, 2012; Hubbard and Wilkinson, 2015; Jungar and Peltonen, 2017). In this sense, homonationalist processes reinforce transnational power structures, justifying foreign intervention and economic sanctions from nation states already privileged in geopolitical relations, as well as consolidating racialized regimes of surveillance, detention, and deportation (Puar, 2013b; Reddy, 2011; Yildiz, 2017).…”

“…In addition to these historical change dynamics, the concept of homonationalism has been used to address the complicities of LGBTQ advocacy in advancing transnational inequities (Haritaworn, 2015; Rastegar, 2013; Ritchie, 2015). In “Rethinking Homonationalism,” Puar (2013b: 337) has more recently stressed that the concept “is fundamentally a deep critique of lesbian and gay liberal rights discourses and how those rights discourses produce narratives of progress and modernity that continue to accord some populations access to citizenship – cultural and legal – at the expense of the delimitation and expulsion of other populations.” That is, the construction of respectable, homonormative subjects in the West, typically linked with whiteness, has been accomplished in part through a contrast with pathologized sexual subjects, frequently positioned as the perverse Muslim other; drawing attention to the purported “freedom” of the former is a way of justifying mechanisms that exclude or surveil the latter, in addition to other groups of immigrants, refugees, and citizens subject to detention regimes (Puar, 2014; Raboin, 2017; Yildiz, 2017). Thus, although homonationalist processes exist beyond LGBTQ communities, the concept provides a useful framework for highlighting how lesbian and gay advocacy may reinforce or challenge imperialistic practices (Haritaworn, 2015; Morgensen, 2010; Schulman, 2012).…”