Border/Line Sex

Abstract

This article foregrounds the current critical emphasis on the language of intersectionality and analogy between race and sexuality, especially with respect to the discourse of rights and discrimination. Such language uses ‘racism’ and ‘race’ as stable registers of oppression, whereby a range of discriminatory practices based on sexual orientation gather representational and judicial validity through their linkage and similarity to such registers. Buried in such ‘linkages’ is the very mathematical paradox of parallelism that forecloses any true intersection, even as it invites lines of common origin and travel. Hence, we are often left with a language of analogy and repetition where race as sex and sex as race become parallel political formations only through a constant reminder of their irreconcilable separation. Instead, I theorize the productive possibility of a Spivakian ‘transactional reading’ whereby the linking of sex and race becomes a dynamic dilation of difference, even as it speaks the language of similarity and kinship. Some of the questions I raise are: Are such analogical invocations of sexuality also about new forms of racisms and imperialisms? Given the rise of queer transnational work, how do we translate the analytical paradigm of ‘race’ outside of its formations in the United States? In order to answer these questions and more, I turn to contemporary mobilizations of the race/sex nexus, especially post the events of 9/11. I focus, in particular, on the successful emergence of queer ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ groups such as Al-Fatiha post 9/11, and situate their success within a critique of American mobilizations of religion, race and sexuality.