Sexual politics, torture, and secular time

If one wants to begin with most common of beginnings, namely, with the claim that one would like to be able to consider sexual politics during this time, a certain problem arises. Since, it seems clear that one cannot reference ‘this time’ without knowing which time, where that time takes hold, and for whom a certain consensus emerges on the issue of what time this is. So if it is not just a matter of differences of interpretation about what time it is, then it would seem that we have already more than one time at work in this time, and that the problem of time will afflict any effort I might make to try and consider some of these major issues now. It might seem odd to begin with a reflection on time when one is trying to speak about sexual politics and cultural politics more broadly. But my suggestion here is that the way in which debates within sexual politics are framed are already imbued with the problem of time, of progress in particular, and in certain notions of what it means to unfold a future of freedom in time. That there is no one time, that the question of what time this is, already divides us, has to do with which histories have turned out to be formative, how they intersect – or fail to intersect with other histories – and so with a question of the how temporality is organized along spatial lines. I’m not suggesting here that we return to a version of cultural difference that depends on cultural wholism. In fact, I oppose any such return. The problem is not that there are different cultures at war with one another, or that there are different modalities of time, each conceived as self-sufficient, that are articulated in different and differentiated cultural locations or that come into confused or brutal contact with one another. Of course, at some level, that could be a valid description, but it would miss an important point, namely, that hegemonic conceptions of progress define themselves over and against a pre-modern temporality that they produce for the purposes of their own self-legitimation. Politically, the questions, what time are we in? are all of us in the same time? and specifically, who has arrived in modernity and who has not? are all raised in the midst of very serious political contestations. The questions cannot be answered through recourse to a simple culturalism. It’s my view that sexual politics, rather than operating to the side of this contestation, is in the middle of it, and that very often claims to new or radical sexual freedoms are appropriated precisely by that point of view – usually enunciated from within state power – that would try to define Europe and the sphere of modernity as the privileged site where sexual radicalism can and does take place. Often, but not always, the further claim is made that such a privileged site of radical freedom must be protected against the putative orthodoxies associated with new immigrant communities. Let’s let that claim stand for the moment, since it carries with it a host of presuppositions that I’ll be trying to understand later in this paper. But let’s remember from the outset that this is a suspect formulation, one that is regularly made by a state discourse that seeks to produce distinct notions of sexual minorities and distinct communities of new immigrants within a temporal trajectory that makes Europe and its state apparatus into the avatar of both freedom and modernity. In my view, the problem is not that there are different temporalities in different cultural locations (and that, accordingly, we simply need to broaden our cultural frameworks to become more internally complicated and capacious). That form of pluralism accepts the distinct and wholistic framing for each of these so-called ‘communities’ and then poses an artificial question about how they might overcome their tensions. Rather, the problem is that certain notions of relevant geopolitical space – including the spatial boundedness of minority communities – are circumscribed by this story of a progressive modernity; certain notions of what ‘this time’ can and must be are similarly construed on the basis of circumscribing the ‘where’ of its happening. I should make clear that I am not opposing all notions of ‘moving forward’ and am certainly not against all versions of ‘progress’ but only that I am profoundly influenced, if not dislocated, by Walter Benjamin’s graphic means for rethinking progress and the time of the ‘now’, and that that is part of what I am bringing to bear on a consideration of sexual politics. I want to say: a consideration of sexual politics now and, of course, that is true, but perhaps my thesis is simply that there can be no consideration of sexual politics without a critical consideration of the time of the now. My claim will be that thinking through the problem of temporality and politics in this way may well open up a different approach to cultural difference, one that eludes the claims of pluralism and intersectionality alike. The point is not just to become mindful of the temporal and spatial presuppositions of some of our progressive narratives, the ones that inform various parochial, if not structurally racist, political optimisms of various kinds. But rather to show that our understanding of what is happening ‘now’ is bound up with a certain geo-political restriction on imagining the relevant borders of the world and even a refusal to understand what happens to our notion of time if we take the problem of the border (what crosses the border, and what does not, and the means and mechanisms of that crossing or impasse) to be central to any understanding of contemporary political life. The contemporary map of sexual politics is crossed, I would say, with contentions and antagonisms, ones that define the time of sexual politics as a fractious constellation; the story of progress is but one strand within that constellation, and it is one that has, for good reason, come into crisis.1 My interest is to focus on how certain secular conceptions of history and of what is meant by a ‘progressive’ position within contemporary politics rely on a conception of freedom that is understood to emerge through time, and which is temporally progressive in its structure (Asad 2003; Connolly 2002; Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2004; Mahmood 2005). This link between freedom and temporal progress is often what is being indexed when pundits and public policy representatives refer to concepts like modernity or, indeed, secularism. I don’t mean to that say this is all they mean, but I do want to say that a certain conception of freedom is invoked precisely as a rationale and instrument for certain practices of coercion, and this places those of us who have conventionally understood ourselves as advocating a progressive sexual politics in a rather serious bind. In this context, I want to point to a few sites of political debate involving both sexual politics and anti-Islamic practice that suggest that certain ideas of the progress of ‘freedom’ facilitate a political division between progressive sexual politics and the struggle against racism and the discrimination against religious minorities. One of the issues that follows from such a reconstellation is that a certain version and deployment of ‘freedom’ can be used as an instrument of bigotry and coercion. This happens most frightfully when women’s sexual freedom or the freedom of expression and association for lesbian and gay people is invoked instrumentally to wage cultural assaults on Islam that reaffirm US sovereign violence. Must we rethink freedom and its implication in the narrative of progress, or must we resituate? My point is surely not to abandon freedom as a norm, but to ask about its uses, and to consider how it must be rethought if it is to resist its coercive instrumentalization in the present and have another meaning that might remain useful for a radical democratic politics. In the Netherlands, for instance, new applicants for immigration are asked to look at photos of two men kissing, and asked to report whether those photos are offensive, whether they are understood to express personal liberties, and whether the viewers are willing to live in a democracy that values the rights of gay people to open and free expression.2 Those who are in favour of the new policy claim that acceptance of homosexuality is the same as embracing modernity. We can see in such an instance how modernity is being defined as sexual freedom, and the particular sexual freedom of gay people is understood to exemplify a culturally advanced position as opposed to one that would be deemed pre-modern. It would seem that the Dutch government has made special arrangements for a class of people who are considered presumptively modern. The presumptively modern includes the following groups who are exempted from having to take the test: European Union nationals, asylum-seekers and skilled workers who earn more than €45,000 per year. Also exempt are citizens of the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan and Switzerland, where presumably homophobia is not to be found or where, rather, importing impressive income levels clearly preempts concerns over importing homophobia.3 In the Netherlands, of course, this movement has been brewing for some time. The identification of gay politics with cultural and political modernity was effected within European politics by Pym Fortuyn, the gay and overtly anti-Islamic politician who was gunned down by a radical environmentalist in the winter of 2002. A similar conflict was also dramatized in the work and the death of Theo van Gogh, who came to stand not for sexual freedom, but for principles of political and artistic freedom. Of course, I am in favour of such freedoms, but it seems that I must also ask whether such freedoms for which I have struggled, and continue to struggle, are being instrumentalized to establish a specific cultural grounding, secular in a particular sense, that functions as a prerequisite for admission into the polity as an acceptable immigrant. In what follows, I will hope to elaborate further what this cultural grounding is, how it functions as both transcendental condition and teleological aim, and how it complicates any firm distinctions we might have between the secular and the religious. In this instance, a set of cultural norms are being articulated that are considered preconditions of citizenship. We might accept the view that there are always such norms, and even accept that full civic and cultural participation for anyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, be included among such norms. But are such norms not only articulated differentially, but also instrumentally, in order to shore up particular religious and cultural preconditions that affect other sorts of exclusions? One is not free to reject this cultural grounding since it is the basis, even the presumptive prerequisite, of the operative notion of freedom, and freedom is articulated through a set of graphic images, figures that come to stand for what freedom can and must be. And so a certain paradox ensues in which the coerced adoption of certain cultural norms becomes a requisite for entry into a polity that defines itself as the avatar of freedom. Is the Dutch government engaging in civic pedagogy through its defense of lesbian and gay sexual freedom, and would it impose such a test on the right-wing white supremacists, such as Vlaams Blok, who are congregated on its border with Belgium and who have called for a cordon sanitaire around Europe to keep out the non-Europeans? Is it administering tests to lesbian and gay people to make sure they are not offended by the visible practices of Muslim minorities? If the civic integration exam were part of a larger effort to foster cultural understanding about religious and sexual norms for a diverse Dutch population, one that included new pedagogies and funding for public arts projects dedicated to this purpose, we might then understand cultural ‘integration’ in a different sense, but certainly not if it is administered coercively. In this case, though, the question raised is: does the exam become the means for testing tolerance or does it carry out an assault against religious minorities, part of a broader effort on the part of the state to demand coercively that they rid themselves of their traditional religious beliefs and practices in order to gain entry into the Netherlands? Is this a liberal defense of my freedom for which I should be pleased, or is my ‘freedom’ freedom, or is my freedom being used as an instrument of coercion, one that seeks to keep Europe white, pure, and ‘secular’ in ways that do not interrogate the violence that underwrites that very project? Certainly, I want to be able to kiss in public – don’t get me wrong. But do I want to require that everyone watch and approve before they acquire rights of citizenship? I think not. If the prerequisites of the polity require either cultural homogeneity or a model of cultural pluralism, then either way, the solution is figured as assimilation to a set of cultural norms that are understood as internally self-sufficient and self-standing. These norms are not in conflict, open to dispute, in contact with other norms, contested or disrupted in a field in which a number of norms converge – or fail to converge – in an ongoing way. The presumption is that culture is a uniform and binding groundwork of norms, and not an open field of contestation, temporally dynamic; this groundwork only functions if it is uniform or integrated, and that desideratum is required, even forcibly, for something called modernity to emerge and take hold. Of course, we can already see that this very specific sense of modernity entails an immunization against contestation, that it is maintained through a dogmatic grounding, and that already we are introduced to a kind of dogmatism that belongs to a particular secular formation. Within this framework the freedom of personal expression, broadly construed, relies upon the suppression of a mobile and contestatory understanding of cultural difference, and that the issue makes clear how state violence invests in cultural homogeneity as it applies its exclusionary policies to rationalize state policies towards Islamic immigrants. I do not traffic in theories of modernity because the concept strikes me as too large, they are, in my view, for the most part too general and sketchy to be useful, and people from different disciplines mean very different things by them; I merely note the way they function in these arguments, and restrict my comments to those kinds of uses. It makes sense to trace the discursive uses of modernity – which is something other than supplying a theory. In this regard, it seems to function neither as a signifier of cultural multiplicity nor of normative schemes that are dynamically or critically in flux, and certainly not as a model of cultural contact, translation, convergence or divergence. To the extent that both artistic expression and sexual freedom are understood as ultimate signs of this developmental version of modernity, and are conceived as rights that are supported by a particular formation of secularism, we are asked to disarticulate struggles for sexual freedom from struggles against racism and anti-Islamic sentiment. There is presumably no solidarity among such efforts within a framework such as the one I have just outlined, though we could, of course, point to existing coalitions that defy this logic. Indeed, according to this view, the struggles for sexual expression depend upon the restriction and foreclosure of rights of religious expression (if we are to stay within the liberal framework), and so we can see something of an antinomy within the discourse of liberal rights itself. But it seems to me that something more fundamental is occurring, namely, that liberal freedoms are understood to rely upon a hegemonic culture, one that is called ‘modernity’ and relies on a certain progressive account of increasing freedoms. This uncritical domain of ‘culture’ that functions as a precondition for liberal freedom in turn becomes the cultural basis for sanctioning forms of cultural and religious hatred and abjection. My point is not to trade sexual freedoms for religious ones, but, rather, to question the framework that assumes that there can be no political analysis that tries to analyse homophobia and racism in ways that move beyond this antinomy of liberalism. At stake is whether or not there can be a convergence or alliance between such struggles or whether the struggle against homophobia must contradict the struggle against cultural and religious racisms. If that framework of mutual exclusion holds – one that is derived, I would suggest, from a restrictive idea of personal liberty that is bound up with a restrictive conception of progress – then it would appear that there are no points of cultural contact between sexual progressives and religious minorities that are not encounters of violence and exclusion. But if, in the place of a liberal conception of personal freedom, we focus on the critique of state violence and the elaboration of its coercive mechanisms, we may well arrive at an alternative political framework, one that implies not only another sense of modernity, but also of the time, the ‘now’, in which we live. It was Thomas Friedman who claimed in The New York Times that Islam has not yet achieved modernity, suggesting that Islam is somehow in a childish state of cultural development and that the norm of adulthood is represented more adequately by critics such as himself.4 In this sense, then, Islam is conceived as not of this time or our time, but as another time, one that only anachronistically emerged in this time. But is not such a view precisely the refusal to think of this time not as one time, as one story, developing unilinearly, but rather as a convergence of histories that have not always been thought together, and whose convergence or lack thereof presents a set of quandaries that might be said to be definitive of our time? A similar dynamic is to be found in France where questions of sexual politics converge in some unhappy ways with anti-immigration politics. Of course, there are profound differences as well. In contemporary France, the culture that is publicly defended against new immigrant communities draws only selectively on normative ideals that structure debates on sexual politics. For instance, dominant draws upon rights of that have been through new sexual politics at the same time that it those very rights of when they to and its to norms of of ‘culture’ and of work and one how a certain kind of progressive sexual politics is as the of a secular of freedom at the same time that the very same conception of secular freedoms as a norm to or to the of and religious communities from and the from full rights of civic and and Indeed, the is even more since the idea of culture, bound up with a conception of is as the freedom to into free but is also invoked to the freedom of lesbian and gay people from or to the rights of but to the norms of The that the for the those into which any two regardless of may are on an of those rights to form on the basis of own and And the cultural preconditions of that freedom are the to – or even – that cultural One can rather on the basis of a of in and that there is a that, for instance, gay and lesbian the of a The among for the has from the on the of the from any rights to adoption or to the In the and public that lesbian or gay – and this would as well – to the very framework that a in order to and understand sexual difference and to gain an in the cultural The presumption is that if a has no that will not come to understand in the culture, and, if it is a that will have no way to or own This assumes but among is the idea that the of is the or major cultural instrument for the of if we were to accept the normative claim that a to be (and there are very good to question this any has to a of that are and through a of cultural The as it in an effort to a alternative to the its cultural on the from any number of and the whether or must and with those norms. But in France, as may the notion of a of called is understood to be by the And this function is or even by the of two of an or of no at One has to struggle not to get into this on these since the the issue at But if one were to get into the one could, of course, make the that can certainly be and by a of another if I that way, I the that the is and must be the cultural site for the and of and that would be a point to accept the idea that without a for there can be no cultural as a position makes the of the into the transcendental condition of culture rather than and as a set of and cultural To understand this it is important to remember that of in France are in the through rights of To the extent that its on it does so precisely through the as the of the debates on sexual politics become bound up with the politics of new immigrant since both rely on ideas of culture that precondition the of If we understand these ideas of culture as then it seems to me that we may well not have a for understanding the from which these ideas of culture are – and by which they continue to be – or for the by which they are It here becomes clear that the theories of development that produce the of culture the of that precondition the rights of citizenship. the of France, can the in that the in the were the of a in represented by new immigrant The of a certain in this as such that we are to understand the political of Islamic minorities as of These kinds of the that Thomas Friedman articulated in to secular modernity, where the figured as a Islam is figured here as the who from politics, even the of the function to the temporal that culture at the of modernity. This version of modernity an odd in which an developmental on freedom, but the form freedom In other can be to any of – the of the that has become for both and But such have to be from that, by and the These norms of are by the which functions in public and it is this order that has to be as it must be against a full by or not such an order is secular is, in my view, another an open but there are to question whether it and certain This becomes for instance, in its defense by the work of who on that the order is both and a prerequisite of The refusal to for gay in with anti-Islamic state policies to a cultural that to a conception of This conceived as and is if by those arrangements understood to be operative in new immigrant communities that fail to the and basis of the which in turn the of culture and the of a within that Of course, what is most about this critique of the in the is not only that it can be found among and their but that it to that contemporary immigration is itself for in certain the government has been willing to from to keep from and to for new immigrant communities. Indeed, some critics have so as to that the of the state itself. One can see one such view for instance, by a who on cultural and who has publicly maintained that the state must in to take the place of the not through conceived as a of the but through the of and of and 2005). In view, this is the only way to the cultural of that is, the cultural that are for the of a certain conception of freedom. the state policies that class racism in efforts to in order to from Islamic and efforts to the as sites of are and through such such as those that in at and not and yet they were as the and of men whose were firm A certain was from the and the culture, and the state as a in such a That the state then a host of for and in the is further that the state to such through and its power in to and arrangements at we might that at a level, the to a notion of freedom that is on is by those freedoms that might the too that is, to the point of the cultural preconditions of itself. In other in formation or in arrangements that do not the of and the norms of rationalize state and that state power in the of the that that cultural which a that is upon violence. The that define culture as supported by the clearly are also those that set the prerequisites for