Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World

Abstract

One of the more compelling issues to emerge out of the gay movement in the last two decades is the universalization of “gay rights.” This project has appropriated the prevailing U.S. discourse on human rights in order to launch itself on an international scale. Following in the footsteps of the white Western women’s movement, which had sought to universalize its issues through imposing its own colonial feminism on the women’s movements in the non-Western world — a situation that led to major schisms from the outset — the gay movement has adopted a similar missionary role. Organizations dominated by white Western males (the International Lesbian and Gay Association [ILGA] and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission [IGLHRC]) sprang up to defend the rights of “gays and lesbians” all over the world and to advocate on their behalf. ILGA, which was founded in 1978 at the height of the Carter administration’s human rights campaign against the Soviet Union and Third World enemies, asserts that one of its aims is to “create a platform for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people internationally, in their quest for recognition, equality, and liberation, in particular through the world and regional confer