Exclusion and complicity
Becoming a lesbian in diaspora
November 14, 2003
The Iranian
This is a version of a talk given at the First Conference on
Homosexuality in Iran, which was organized by Homan and
took place at UCLA on November 8th, 2003. I was asked by a member
of the audience to
submit this short paper to iranian.com, which I am in the hopes
that it will not be taken as a grounds for further homophobic bashings
of groups such as Homan. While I may be critical of certain forms
of gay/lesbian politics, I think Homan has been an important resource
for many Iranian queers in the U.S. and deserves credit for posing
a challenge to heteronormative imaginations of Iranian-ness.
Parts of this piece are taken from a section
in a thesis I had previously written, on the discursive production
of Iranian queer
subjects in diaspora. As this version was presented in a non-academic
conference, citations have been omitted. However, my ideas in this
piece are informed by theories of sexuality, in particular those
formulated by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler.
October 4, 1995; the asylum office in San Francisco. In a room
adorned by several statues of liberty, I am assured by an asylum
officer that they know about the violation of gay and lesbian human
rights in the undemocratic Iran. After putting aside the evidence
of "truth" about my claim to lesbianism (two thick
folders that took months of research and recalling personal memories),
he engages me in a patronizing conversation about veiling and the
oppression of women in Iran. I cannot argue, or I will lose the
asylum case. This is how I, the foreign student with a F1 visa,
who had risked too much by participating in queer politics, and
was "outed" to her family unwillingly, became the Iranian
lesbian asylee with an I-94 card.
October 15, 1995, two days after my asylum is issued,
a San Francisco radio station reporter calls for an interview and
wants me to talk
about the "horrific situation" in Iran. When I refuse
to conduct the interview, he tells me, "We gave you asylum,
honey. You may as well talk about it."
Occupying a queer diasporic space has constantly demanded the proof
of authenticity of roots, culture, origin, and nation, while obliging
visibility and "outness."
My experience of displacement
has involved reterritorializations based on my relationships
to various nations, not just geographically imagined, but also
marked
by gender, race, sexuality, and class. Moreover, my histories of
claiming lesbian-ness, immigrant/asylee status, and Iranian-ness,
have not escaped politics that have simultaneously been complicit
and oppositional with hegemonic forms of knowledge. Nor have I
always evaded the homogenizing impulses of Iranian-ness and queer-ness
in diasporic locations.
I haven't just "thought" about queer subjectivity,
but struggled with it in my fourteen-year history of displacement
in the U.S., as well as my years of growing up in Iran. I have
been performing queerness through being "out" and "closeted," and
for a long period of my life in spaces between the two, when I
was interpellated as neither, and therefore not obliged to confess
the "truth" of my sexuality.
I have become (though
at times insisted on being) queer (or not) in familiar and unfamiliar
spaces of family, Iranian diaspora, academia, feminist work, immigrant
advocacy work, and the immigration office where I occupied the
position of asylum applicant, and not that of the advocate. Like
many people, I negotiated and struggled for and with my multiple
subjectivities. At times my contestation to a white queerness hinged
upon my participation in particular forms of cultural nationalism
and diasporic notions of the nation, which also Othered my queer
body.
It was also in 1995, and before I received my asylum,
that I was invited to write a report on Iran for a book called Unspoken
Rules,
a collection of articles about abuses of women's human rights
based on sexual orientation. In this book, I wrote (1995: 89), "Under
the current Iranian regime, widespread legal and social persecution
of sexual minorities makes it impossible for lesbians to form organizations
or to live openly in any aspect of their lives." This concern
over being "out" and visible was so significant to
me that I overlooked my privilege of being located in the U.S.,
and undermined the multiplicity of experiences of those whom I
marked as "lesbians."
It was not until I was "outed" in
the U.S. to my family in Iran that I realized, by the force of
devastation, why outness was not my foremost concern before. I
had lived a queer life without a name in Iran, where I did not
find disclosing my sexuality necessary. However, in Unspoken
Rules,
my forgetful memory had re-membered a community of lesbians in
Iran for whom invisibility was the most important ordeal. Was it
the "Iranian lesbian community" that I represented,
or was it my desire to believe that there was a community of lesbians
in Iran that forged such a community in my writing?
I have since
thought about my lovers in Iran, the married and unmarried women
whom I had met in Tehran's high schools and sports teams,
Tabriz University's dormitories, and on the Iran-Payma bus
on my way to Turkey on a quest to get a U.S. student visa. Did
these women ever consider themselves to be lesbians, or did I want
them to be lesbians after becoming an "advocate" for
lesbian rights in the U.S.?
Undoubtedly, there are women in Iran
who "self-identify" (do we ever, "self" identify?)
as lesbians, as well as those who struggle to "live openly." But
there are also those who despite their relationships with other
women, may not consider lesbian-identification, or being "out'
as the struggle in their lives. And then, there are those who "re-member" memories
in new places…
Becoming a Lesbian in Diaspora
I am often asked by those curious souls, who are surprised to see
a queer Iranian woman, whether I "realized" that I
was a lesbian after I came to the U.S. I often say no, to simplify
the answer and to escape an unnerving conversation. However, I
believe that my "lesbian-ness" was real-ized in diaspora.
Undeniably, I had relationships with women in Iran, but never did
I have to assert an identity and adopt a name to highlight my sexuality.
I do not mean to idealize Iran as a place where people "endow
themselves with an ars erotica" (Foucault, 1978, 1990: 57).
I find this idealization of pleasure in the "Arabo-Moslem
societies" an Orientalist perception.
I am well aware of
the restrictive laws against homosexuality of men and women in
Iran. However, my aim is to emphasize the different ways by which
subjects are constructed at different times and locations by different
discourses.
I think we need to think about how one's recognition
as a queer subject in the U.S. is reliant on her/his sexualization
and
one's fixing to her/his essence of sexuality. We also need
to think about how asylum laws (and I'm talking about asylum
based on sexual orientation here) produce queer subjects and fix
them into immutable sexualities, while claiming to protect and
represent them, and how queers (both subjects and organizations
that "represent" them) in fact shape not just queer
asylum laws, but reiterate their norms through performativity.
I also want to draw our attention to how the possibility of a queer
subjecthood is dependent on "outness." I want us to
think about how once one enunciates her/his "outness," one
is fixed into sexualized categories that while destabilize norms,
reiterate them.
Going back to my story… For me, becoming a queer subject
in diaspora did not happen at a definitive point. (And when I say "becoming," it
does not mean that I am talking about a finished process. Obviously,
my citation of the Iranian queer diaspora does not carry the same
meaning in every temporal and spatial setting. Because of the continuous
deferral of meaning, the term Iranian queer diaspora is not stable
and may reiterate conventions or undermine them.) I have become
and am still becoming a queer diasporic subject as I am interpellated
by discourses that surround me and subject me to their rules of
regulation (discourses that I contest and therefore shift in every
becoming).
I "became" a lesbian when an asylum officer
authorized my presence; I "became" an un-lesbian when
I filled out the visa form in the American embassy in Turkey, where
I had to answer "no" to the un-qualifying question
of sexual deviancy; I became a lesbian when I married a woman and
wore a tuxedo; I became an un-lesbian when I was scorned for forging
a relationship with a "straight" woman; … and
I am still becoming and unbecoming as I talk to you here at UCLA
in this conference on homosexuality.
To be sure, in order to maintain my status as a
subject, I have had (and continue to) to comply with hegemonic
conventions, to
the extent that I have embodied
the realms of queer Iranian subjecthood. This does not take away my agency, as
I am not just implicated by these conventions, but (as Judith Butler argues)
participate/intervene in them in their reiterative course. (Asylum laws and advocacy,
healthcare policies concerning "risk-prone" communities and advocacy
for these communities are examples of this complying and shifting).
And so, you may ask, what is the point of emphasizing
this becoming and being in my talk? Many times I hear people say
that "we have to accept ourselves
first and come out, form a community, and then when we are accepted, we can
get to other things" (which I take means politics). My point
in talking about becoming is to argue against this approach (for
example see Dr. Payam's "Being
real"). I don't think that one is
born prior to discourse,
or that s/he first becomes "complete" as a liberated gay/lesbian,
and then engages in politics. One is not prior to politics, but always becoming
through her/his dynamic relationship with multiple discourses and politics.
In addition, identities are never complete, but
are always in flux and changing. So, I conceptualize self-hood
and subjectivity not in teleological terms (assuming
that one journeys through an evolutionary course to reach self-actualization,
as for example, proposed in developmental frameworks of psychoanalysis),
but in contingent and fragmented ways.
In other words, my terms
are less certain
and less celebratory of an "out" and liberated gay and lesbian-ness,
even while I see the importance of affirmation of our existence. (And yes, "we
exist!" as the title of the film in this conference asserts). This is
how I come to talk about the Iranian queer diaspora, not as an abstract idea,
but
as embodied theory. I write from multiple positions that I occupy, not as
fixed locations, but as historicized and contingent relationships between
knowledge
and experience. At the end, am I suggesting that we do away with
community-building efforts, if we are to critique fixed notions
of identity? Certainly not! What I am
suggesting is that we reevaluate our terms of activism and pay attention
to exclusionary
practices in territorializations of what is come to be imagined as a coherent
Iranian gay and lesbian community. I believe that hegemonic discourses
of Iranian-ness, American-ness, gay and lesbian-ness, along with
discourses
such as psychoanalysis,
medicine/healthcare, and asylum, designate a particular space for queers,
which is that of the abject; one outside the "norm."
It is our performances
of identity that reify these norms, even as we contest them. Contestation
of power by Iranian queers and their negotiations for legitimate
spaces in national
imaginations and cultural narratives, such as history, transforms this
notion of the "norm." However, in this struggle for hegemony, particular
identities, such as Iranian gay and lesbian, are coined as "real" through
exclusion and complicity.
This critique is not to paralyze the possibility
of politics, but to enable a different form of politics that is
not solely celebratory
and takes pride in taken-for-granted identities, but one that constantly
and critically questions these identities. A form of politics that
pays attention
to resistances, as well as complicities; A form of politics that "steps
back" and re-evaluates itself in its course of activism and does
not just take part in activism for the sake of activism.
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