QUEER ISLAM AND NEW HISTORICISM

Abstract

You will remember that the project of largely American ‘New Historicism’ was committed to uncovering the repressed of texts, to unravelling Foucauldian genealogies in all their thick descriptiveness. Judith Butler leapt fully formed from Foucault's multi-volume history of sexuality, claiming that there was no such thing as ‘a sexuality’ or a ‘gender identity’ that existed before its production in discourse, and in the body experienced, performed, and analysed as a material and thus also discursive field. This essay will read into one another new work on the history of sexuality within Islamic cultures, in which a certain queering of the historical record takes place, and novelistic representations of subjectivity and embodied experience within Islam, in which a certain queering of consciousness takes place. What is revealed as ‘the difference of Islam’, I shall argue, is that everyday life is often represented as happening within the theological panopticon. Islam appears to be experienced as a particularly intense set of gazes marking what I will call an enfolded subjectivity. And yet this difference is far from an absolute one. There may be common affects represented even where sexual practices and their epistemological grids differ. What one must remain alert to is that the very mapping of identity onto sexuality both may and yet may not be happening according to Western preconceptions of this process.