Week 7 Reflection

I thought one of the most fascinating and relevant points of discussion in Murray's article, The Will Not to Know, was the concept of gay as a purely sexual phenomena, not a state of being. The current modern perception of what it means to be gay places a lot of emphasis on the exact opposite, that's it's more than a sexual preference but part of who a person is, that it is part of what defines them as an individual human being. Murray goes onto to claim that in pre-modern Islamic societies, homosexual behavior was extremely common as long as it was practiced within the confines of the social structures that had been established to deal with it. In other words, as long as the man still produced a family and kept his sexual partners of sight and didn't flaunt his behavior, it was never brought up as an issue. But I think that using this social paradigm as a basis for claiming that there was no emotional relationship between these men and their partners isn't very well supported. Both Murray and Najmabadi discuss the way homosexual relationships were portrayed in pre-modern art and poetry. While it may be difficult to conclusively prove, I think that the argument could be made that there are emotions and indications of real love for their male sexual partners made through those art forms. These men had a choice to sleep with these other men and with a sense of choice, isn't there always some emotional subtext?

I also think that the real difference between pre-modern and modern interpretation of homosexuality is the sense of community often associated with it. I think the homosexual community as an out and proud and vocal group is a modern organization, whereas in the post modern era men weren't united by their homosexuality. But I also think that a very important issue raised by Najmabadi is that part of the reason there was a shift in the way the Muslim world viewed sexuality was because of the effects of Victorian Puritanism and the binary gender model it perpetuated. While other authors may claim that the West is responsible for the creation of homosexuality as a state of mind, I think that the West's real lasting effect on homosexuality in the Middle East was to make homosexuality exclusively refer to men who slept with other men. The West stripped the fluidity of human sexuality from the Middle East, segregating and categorizing as it went, giving no thought to the fact that there are men who like men and women, or women who identify as boys or vice versa. It seems, once again, that the West went in and homogenized everything by creating only two acceptable categories of being and gender and by deeming everything outside of that deviant.