“I’d rather my brother was a bomber than a homo”: British Muslim masculinities and homonationalism in Sally El Hosaini’sMy Brother the Devil

Abstract

Images of young British Muslim men engaging in terrorist activity or gang warfare proliferate in contemporary media. Such distortions frame Muslim males as a homogeneous and threatening presence within Britain; men who, despite living in the UK, are prone to a pathological form of masculinity supposedly inculcated by their religio-cultural background. In Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir K. Puar develops the framework of “homonationalism” to examine the relationship between hostilities towards Muslims and growing acceptance of LGBT subjectivities in Euro-America. Puar argues that popular discourses stereotype diverse ethno-cultural groups under a distinct racialized, religiously-defined “Muslim” grouping. These Muslim “others”, recognized through racial and sartorial profiling, are assigned viewpoints that place them in opposition to the purportedly “enlightened” West. Puar shows how this dualism has been continually reproduced in cultural production, propagating the view that to be Muslim is to be axiomatically homophobic. This article assesses the extent to which homonationalism is replicated in the British film My Brother the Devil (dir. Sally El Hosaini, 2012). Set on a housing estate in Hackney, it depicts two London-born brothers of Egyptian heritage, Rash and Mo, as elder brother Rash leaves his “gangster” lifestyle after falling in love with photographer Sayid. My Brother the Devil invokes moral panics about young British Muslim men, as well as the increased visibility of homosexuality in recent UK media and cultural output, to probe connections between masculinity, sexuality, race, and class. However, this article posits that My Brother the Devil inadvertently upholds homonationalist binaries. By analysing the film, this paper contends that what Puar terms a “Muslim or gay binary” should be considered in a British context to address how certain “liberal” Muslim subjectivities are incorporated within imaginings of Britishness, at the exclusion of Muslim subjectivities that do not fit these prescriptions.