FORUM ON RAHUL RAO’S OUT OF TIME Contexto Internacional

vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023

[Link]

Forum on Rahul Rao’s Out

of Time, Part II: Rethinking
Homonationalisms
Jasbir Puar*
Shirin Deylami**

Abstract: In this Forum, six scholars reflect on Rahul Rao’s recent book Out of Time: The Queer
Politics of Postcoloniality from other geographies, themes and radical possibilities. Part II explores
the analytic of homonationalism in dialogue with Rao’s Out of Time. Jasbir Puar, who coined the
term in an earlier path-breaking work, thinks with and against Rao’s book on the relations between
homonationalism and what Rao called homocapitalism. Puar also explores how the caste-gender
politics of Radical Sikhi during the Farmers’ Protests in India (2020-2021) can serve as an al-
ternative source of inspiration, companion to the queer and trans Dalits of Rao’s book. Shirin
Deylami reflects on Rao’s work by exploring the disoriented grammars of the Iranian Islamic state.
Specifically, Deylami analyses the way in which the discourse of westoxification has influenced
and challenged the divergent state responses to transgender claims for care versus gay and lesbian
rights claims.

Keywords: homonationalism; homocapitalism; caste; gender, queer postcolonial; Iran;

Westoxification.

* Rutgers University, New Brunswick – NB, United States; jpuar@[Link]. ORCiD 0009-0004-6002-
9785.
** Western Washington University (WWU), Bellingham – WA, United States; deylams@[Link]. ORCiD
0000-0003-0159-3664.

Rethinking Homonationalisms e20220007 vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023 1 of 21

Rethinking Homonationalism, Redux
Jasbir Puar

What is homonationalism in the context of the global proliferation of authoritarian

regimes? The concept of homonationalism has primarily been theorised in relation to
liberal democratic states to mark the incorporation of mostly white/cis/elite gays and
lesbians into the folds of national recognition through ‘civil’ rights and ‘human’ rights.
Given this genealogy, there is often an assumption by commentators that homonational-
ism cannot exist under authoritarian regimes. While we should not dismiss the capacity
for authoritarian regimes to weaponise queerness — for example in the Philippines,
when Duterte’s campaign in 2016 instrumentalised queer issues—this assumption is one
that is often borne out at a surface level. If homonationalism is an analytic that flags the
alliances between LGBTQ populations and national ideologies, contemporary conflu-
ences render somewhat imperceptible these alignments. Authoritarian governments in
Brazil, India, Turkey, and Hungary are not only antithetical to but increasingly assaul-
tive towards queer, transgender, and women’s rights. France’s reactionary stance towards
‘American’ gender and race studies deepens and accompanies Islamophobic policies to-
wards Muslims especially regards to head coverings. In the USA there are or have been
more than 117 anti-trans bills in numerous state legislatures, often directed at programs
for transgender youth, medical care, bathroom access, and inclusion in sports; replicas of
Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ legislation are being proposed in numerous states. In June 2021,
after years of attacks on Gender Studies programs and queer organisations, Hungary
passed a law banning the promotion of LGBTQ content to minors. Brazil has endured
Bolsonaro’s crusade against ‘gender ideology’ which targets feminism and LGBTQ rights.
Anti-feminist movements against gender ideology—‘anti-gender movements’ that have
emerged globally and transnationally—seek to pathologise and criminalise gender and
sexual fluidity and not always in the name of conservative values or right-wing author-
itarian politics. The rise of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) and other ver-
sions of ‘gender critical’ anti-trans feminists claim the space of the ‘radical’ and thus dilute
distinctions between progressive and right-wing ideologies and foster unseemly political
alliances that are para-national in scope and converge at transphobic politics.
These are just some examples of the increasing criminalisation of LGBTQ popula-
tions, much of it in places where decriminalisation was incrementally solidified in past
decades. How do we think about the shift to all-out war on LGBTQ populations? It is
hard not to index these trajectories as the decline of ‘homonationalist’ states concomi-
tant with the rise of illiberal right-wing governments. But it might be more apt to situate
homonationalism in the context of liberal rights platforms that are increasingly emptied
of their meaning and efficacy. Despite these anti-gender conservative political agendas
within and across nation-states, major military organisations and global financial gov-
ernance structures persist with proclamations of LGBTQ inclusion. I tend to reiterate
often that, in my original conceptualisation, homonationalism is not a descriptor, not

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an adjective, rather a hermeneutic that asks how and why ‘how well do you treat your
homosexuals?’ emerges as an arbiter of the capacity for national sovereignty, for gover-
nance and self-determination. I therefore have never thought of homonationalism as an
attribute of any one state or states; rather it is the field within which, from the vantage
of the USA, demarcations of nation-states as ‘progressive,’ ‘gay-friendly,’ ‘tolerant,’ and
conversely, ‘homophobic,’ ‘backwards,’ and ‘barbaric’ have salience in the first place. The
thorny conundrum is not then ‘how homonationalist’ a state is, but rather asking what is
at stake for ‘liberal democratic’ states-gone-authoritarian to attack LGBTQ rights at this
political juncture. Who or what do these ‘rollbacks’ benefit, and how? Given the endless
contradictions of liberalism, I suggest we think about authoritarian states as laboratories
for the perverse machinations of gender, sexual, and racial regulation and repression.
Despite these regimes, there continues to be a co-constituted existence of liberal pro-
gressive ideals of queer rights, tolerance, and freedom alongside and working through
homophobia, violent repression, and ostracisation. These two supposedly opposite poles
are used to alternately laud and demonise different populations. In fact, we might think
of homonationalism and authoritarianism as often operating in a tandem formation that
is only seemingly contradictory. And as with the examples of the Philippines and Israel,
the presumption that authoritarianism and extreme right regimes are antithetical to
homonationalism must be carefully interrogated.
In the United States, the weaponisation of queer identities in the service of this os-
cillation affords a flexible whiteness that can be rehabilitated into liberal positions (think
Pete Buttigieg) as well as white supremacist formations (think Milo Yiannapoulos). In
the wake of 9/11, the enfolding of queer complicity with the War on Terror transited
through the propagation of Islamophobic tropes of perverse Muslim homo and hetero
sexuality. While crucial gains in the US LGBTQ rights movement appear to be leaking
away, it is also the case that the civilisational discourses of Islamophobia that subtends
homonationalism—illiberal, terrorist, uncivil, viral brown bodies threatening the ‘safe
space’ of white American soil—are tenaciously intact, often so embedded in the quo-
tidian discourse of security as to dissolve into nonrecognition. Islamophobic tropes are
however easily animated. The narration of the current pandemic, for example, is deeply
embedded in terrorist discourses, a lexicon of epidemiology that fuses terrorism to the
plague, illness, contagion, and the uncontained virus as refractions of a body politic that
is ever vulnerable.1 And in the last twenty years, the changing racial landscape of the USA
has centered anti-blackness through a forceful critique of liberal multiculturalism and
the coalitional limits of the term ‘people of color.’ Thus, it warrants attention that Black
Lives Matter has been referred to as a ‘domestic terrorist’ organisation propagating ‘sin-
gle-issue extremist ideologies.’ LGBTQ rights may be deteriorating, but the racial elas-
ticity of terrorism and the bodies that reference it has only become more emboldened.
That is to say that the civilisational alibis of homonationalism—‘our’ investments in
liberal codes of progress, acceptance, and inclusion—are no less salient now, especially
as they are increasingly discarded if not destroyed by conservatives. Insofar as Trump
inverted American exceptionalism and demonstrated that civility is an empty value de-
ployed primarily to racialise bodies as unruly, these liberal codes might be both more
Rethinking Homonationalisms e20220007 vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023 3 of 21
pertinent than ever—we need to hang on to some belief in them—yet evermore inef-
fective or relevant. While anti-gender movements rage in so many parts of the world,
glorified commitments to LGBTQ inclusion are still claimed by imperial governance
structures such as NATO and the US marines.
Homonationalism as I initially schematised in Terrorist Assemblages is thus foremost
a theory of US racial formation, a disciplining of US subjects in relation to US empire: a
dual movement of incorporation and abjection that instrumentalises the discourses and
affects of American exceptionalism. Its most efficacious employment, and its most im-
portant effect, is to excuse, minimise, and deflect from trans and queerphobia in the USA
and to normalise Islamophobia—in other words, to create docile American subjects of
US empire. The vocabulary of homonationalism has been helpful to illuminate the subtle
complicities of (queer) (feminist) liberal rights discourses with Islamophobia. It has tar-
geted the pervasive developmentalist discourse subtending ‘the west and the rest’ and the
‘woman question to the homosexual question.’ And I think most importantly, it has situ-
ated the civilisational discourses animating the US-led War on Terror that solicit and dis-
avow various genders and sexualities. The original framing of homonationalism arises in
the context of Islamophobia and its imbrication with the US security state. These civilisa-
tional narratives continue to contribute to the US imperial geopolitical relations with the
Middle East. Further, a shared global Islamophobia, the likes of which, as Ghassan Hage
(2017) argues, has national inflections but a pan-national coherence, makes homona-
tionalism intelligible from the USA to Israel, India, France, the UK, among so many
sites. The seduction at work in homonationalism remains a powerful one, which is the
cathecting to Islamophobia as a rite of passage to national belonging.
But the invocation of homonationalism has become performative: it produces what
it names. Insofar as the dilemmas subtending how theory is received, negotiated, refut-
ed or refused are irresolvable, the distinction between an analytic and its deployment
is a false one. In this regard, homonationalism only remains useful as an analytic if we
acknowledge that its own theoretical force transits through the very circuits of empire,
settler colonialism, neoliberal multiculturalism, developmentalism, and indeed, uneven
academic privileges,2 that it seeks to upend, insofar as homonationalism has become a
soundbite far afield from the context of its production. When presumed to be and/or
applied as a statist theory, the limits of homonationalism are readily apparent, making
homonationalism seem like a portable construct, when indeed, as so much scholarship
has shown, it is not. When an analytic becomes a descriptor, when something that once
allowed us to perceive something now keeps us from perceiving something else, we are
able to mark both what was missing and a historical shift in consciousness and per-
spective, and this is a welcome and necessary acknowledgement of the fact of historical
change.

Out of time, out of place

One of the most meaningful interventions in the hegemonic travels of the analytic of
homonationalism is found in Rahul Rao’s terrific book Out of Time: The Queer Politics of

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Postcoloniality. At the virtual launch of the book in May 2020 Rao stated: ‘Now that we
have understood homonationalism, we have overcorrected for it.’ This overcorrection is
precisely the performativity I speak of, an ‘applied’ use of homonationalism as a statist
theory or theory of the state, resulting in the designation of a state as ‘homonationalist’
as well as an evaluation of how homonationalism works in X country, as opposed to an
evaluation of the relevance of the frame from the start. This statist application is often
accompanied by a subsuming Orientalising of ‘local’ nation-state actors that might have
far more important things to deal with than tarrying with discourses of the west. Rao
convincingly intervenes not through staging a reversal of actors—the rest to the west—or
arguing for a subaltern sexuality of the global south. Rather he emphasises the plethora
of global, regional, and sub and para-national entities populating the movements for
LGBTQ rights in Uganda and India: the solicitous transit of international actors such as
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), NGOs, (western) governmen-
tal aid, and other networks which impel acquiescence by illiberal states to LGBTQ rights
platforms, promising economic growth and productivity in exchange for partaking in
complex transactional networks devoid of consistent political alignments. Marked by
‘collaboration and transaction across the North/South divide’ (Rao 2020: 219), what Rao
(2020: 25) calls homocapitalism is
an ideology forged in interaction between elite LGBT activists and
technocrats in international financial institutions (IFIs)…Denied
belonging within the nation, some activists have turned to making
the case for inclusion, not in a language of justice or human rights,
but through a refiguration of the queer as model capitalist subject
whose inclusion promises a future of growth and economic dyna-
mism. This argument has been embraced by IFIs eager to rehabili-
tate themselves in a time of capitalist crisis by brandishing an image
of progressiveness.

Rao (2020: 163) notes that by ‘inveigh[ing] against ‘homophobia’ in the global South’
‘global homocapitalism…operates through the stick of capital withdrawal as punishment
for homophobia, and the carrot of economic growth promised by the business case for
LGBT rights.’
Homonationalism as I understood and elaborated it was never not driven by nego-
tiations of capitalist reward, and there is sustained attention in Terrorist Assemblages to
how neoliberal multiculturalism produces economic vectors of racial difference and con-
tainment through sexual regulation. The discussion of the parallels (and divergences) be-
tween Lisa Duggan’s (2003) discussion of homonormativity and homonationalism also
draws on necessary critique of the political and economic governmentality of contem-
porary capitalism. But it is true that the argument itself is not anti-capitalist, and here I
appreciate Rao’s (2020: 146) repeatedly stated desire for a ‘specifically queer investment
in anti-capitalist critique.’ If homonationalism, as a ‘grammar of the state’ that ‘sets the
terms of recognition’ (Rao 2020: 215), works in the service of foiling the question of cap-
italism and politics of redistribution, it does so via the mirage of the recognition versus
Rethinking Homonationalisms e20220007 vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023 5 of 21
redistribution binary. Paraphrasing Duggan, Rao (2020: 153) notes that ‘the distinction
between recognition and redistribution is a ruse through which neoliberal capitalism
pretends to become more inclusive by seizing on a low-cost way of projecting a new
queer friendliness.’
One example of this queer friendliness discussed in Terrorist Assemblages is the
LGBTQ tourism industry post-9/11, which exhorted consumers to spend money, be a
good patriotic queer, travel as queer. The convergence of market and state interests for
queer subjects is remarkable precisely because there was no such prior alignment—for
decades this industry, and more generally the production of LGBTQ populations as a
profligate market and ideal consumers available for what Rao calls ‘full market citizen-
ship’ narrated itself as a compensatory strata that ameliorated the denial of state rec-
ognition through its self-proclaimed status as a supra-national formation, one that was
determined to produce the conditions of gay-friendliness through pink dollars wherever
it sought to do so. Queer mobility equaled economic mobility and vice versa, and the
industry was as interested in the disciplining of homophobia through capital as it was
in maintaining a sexually lascivious Orientalist project of danger elsewhere. Is this and
other related discourses of ‘pink dollars’ that emerged in the 1990s a kind of proto-ho-
mocapitalism, one that foregrounded the queer as consumer-citizen and a quasi-figure
of developmentalism akin to current day imbrications of developmentalism and queer
mobility? And when we talk about homocapitalism, are we looking at three scales, the
state, queer global South movements that are infused with capital from global North
sources, and the queer liberal subject conditioned through capitalist rewards and the
promise of upward mobility?
Shifting the discussion from the oft-regarded ‘clash of civilisations’ discourse of
homonationalism with its focus on the cultures of nations and religions, rights and
recognition, Rao’s analysis foregrounds the materiality of geopolitical orderings of the
global theater of nation-state alliances and disaffiliations. Yet Rao explicates that homon-
ationalism and homocapitalism are not necessarily oppositional, rather are juxtaposed
through a series of supplementary relations that shift in proportionality, foreground-
ing, and backgrounding depending on place, scale, and the construction of location:
the ‘civilisationalist’ logic of homonationalism must be supplemented with the political
economy logic of ‘homocapitalism.’ Focusing on places where homosexuality remains or
is being criminalised, and where ‘LGBT movements owe their very origins to the dyna-
mism and reach of neoliberal capitalism’ (Rao 2020: 166), Rao writes that
The promise of futurity inherent in homocapitalism may prove to
be more seductive where the chastisement of homonationalism has
not “yet” succeeded in drawing recalcitrant states into its embrace
or, worse, has raised their anti-imperialist shackles. Indeed, pre-
cisely as a result of the intellectual, even if not political, success of
the critique of homonationalism, homocapitalism may be emerging
as the weapon of choice wielded by a global queer liberalism. (2020:
11-12)

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 This sentence intrigues me because it suggests that the overcorrection that Rao
speaks of is indicative of a pharmakon: poison, cure, and scapegoat at once. I am re-
minded of something South Asian Studies and queer theory scholar Anjali Arondekar
said to me long ago, in 1998, that resistance to queer theory in South Asia was not, at
that time, driven by homophobia so much as an annoyance with the imperious orien-
tations and indeed imperial transits of the US academy. In this remark Arondekar is
marking the exceptionalism of US-based theory. And yet, Rao (2020: 114) also insists,
in a slight departure from this earlier pronouncement of homocapitalism as resistance to
the shaming/liberal outrage mechanisms of homonationalism, that postcolonial popula-
tions, in particular for him postcolonial elite, cannot be excused from ‘queerphobia’ and
a tendency towards ‘homoromanticism—an affective stance in which the queer predic-
aments of the postcolonial world are attributed entirely to its colonial experience, with
the agency of postcolonial elites in co-producing those predicaments being obscured.’
Homoromanticism is also posited as a ‘kneejerk’ response to the critiques of homon-
ationalism, suggesting that homonationalism is both a diagnosis of the state and may
provoke an anti-imperialist response by the state.
Rao (2020: 151, 13) also points to two distinct technologies of power being exer-
cised, coercion/dominance and complicity/consent, arguing that because homocapital-
ism promises ‘a rosy future of growth and productivity,’ it ‘draw[s]on the hegemonic logic
of neoliberal reason…offer[ing] an apparently more consensual strategy of persuasion
than homonationalism with its coercive tropes of civilisation and barbarism.’ Rao (2020:
151) quickly goes on to clarify that
This is not to suggest that homocapitalism lacks a coercive dimen-
sion…[rather] to suggest that the balance of coercion and consent
in homonationalism and homocapitalism is different. Deploying
Guha’s Gramscian understanding of these terms, we might say that
where the former tends toward dominance, the latter tends toward
hegemony.

I appreciate this distinction very much, and/but I am wondering, given that both are
mapping out relations of incorporation and abjection, albeit differently abjected, wheth-
er ‘disciplining’ as a modality of power runs across homonationalism/homocapitalism,
making them contiguous. I am putting pressure on this point because Rao’s foreground-
ing of homonationalism as predominantly an anxiety-inducing shaming mechanism to
chastise wayward states for their homophobia cannot, in my mind, account for how it is
also, in actuality, a reward structure for the propagation of Islamophobia, as is for exam-
ple the case with Hindutva in India.
In any case this balance has a particular impact on regions most directly impacted
by the War on Terror, the Middle East extending to West Asia, where the material ef-
fects of civilisational disciplining have been deleterious to say the least. In the aftermath
of 9/11, friends who worked in the region at Human Rights Watch, Helem, al-qaws,
and other human rights and LGBTQ non-profits noted the onslaught of humanitarian,
NGO, and even state-driven funding cashing in on the marketisation of the purported
Rethinking Homonationalisms e20220007 vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023 7 of 21
novelty of Muslim queers. A friend quipped, as the money started drying out in 2010s,
that Africa had become the new Middle East for these efforts. While this example is
anecdotal, this affective registering that capital might ‘move on,’ as it were, also reflects
the interplay between homonationalism and homocapitalism. Rao argues that since the
discursive weight of homonationalism can be—and is sometimes—opposed by coun-
ternationalisms, homocapitalism can be meaningfully resisted only in an anti-capitalist
register. Given the material punishments and rewards that homonationalism is tied to,
generates and impels, I am not so quick to parse out the discursive, as if homonational-
ism is merely discursive. But Out of Time marks an important historical shift from the
focus on justice, human rights, and equality, to a wholesale uptake, even by queer and
other progressive entities, of economic growth and the ‘cost’ of homophobia to corpora-
tions and nation-state apparatuses. As such I share the concern about how the critique of
homonationalism might contribute to a sidestepping of the specifically queer investment
in anti-capitalism that Rao so tenaciously holds forth.

Radical Sikhi

I was reading Out of Time during the height of the Farmers’ Protests in India in spring
2021 and began thinking through the connections between caste and sexuality that Rao
articulates in this book. In a beautiful chapter on the tactical use of the caste category
of ‘backwardness’ by queer and trans Dalit activists in India to lobby for state recogni-
tion, Rao (2020: 15) illuminates the Mobius strip quality of caste and gender relations,
stating that ‘caste is the regulation of gender, which is caste.’ Rao (2020: 172) writes that
‘In a neoliberal India dominated by a caste Hindu Right, collective Dalit assertion in
the terms advocated by Ambedkar is queerer than a same-sex kiss.’ I love this sentence
for so many reasons, but especially for how it shifts the register of what constitutes ‘a
radically anti-assimilationist project queer politics’ (Rao 2020: 195). He continues, ‘For
Ambedkar the ‘annihilation of caste’…from simply enabling Dalits to become like caste
Hindus…entailed the production of a new Dalit subjectivity marked by a revolutionary
consciousness’ (2020: 195). For Rao (2020: 198) the subjectivities of queer and trans
Dalits foreground ‘the manner in which the destruction of caste becomes imbricated
with gender transition.’
With this imbrication of caste and gender in mind, I turn now to the gendered, sexu-
al, and caste specifics of the epic year-long Farmers’ Protests, which began in November
2020 with hundreds of thousands of farmers and laborers from across India, and espe-
cially from Punjab and Haryana, on their tractors driving to the outskirts of New Delhi.
Numerous writers and activists have analysed everything from the global networks of
agrarian crises to the rise of Hindutva to the resistance of neoliberalism to the dynamics
of on-the-ground activist organising to the proliferation of diasporic solidarity protests:
Ravinder Kaur, Navyug Gill, Bikrum Gill, Harsha Walia, Amardeep Dhillon, Navkiran
Natt, Nodeep Kaur, and the Panth Punjab lecture series.3 What follows here is not a
contribution to these incisive analyses but rather a probing into the ideological and theo-
logical orientations that inform the protests principle here and throughout.

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 These protests have been hailed the largest in all of human history, but outside of
South Asia-specific forums they have merited little attention to their emergent radical
politics and solidarity formations, ones that might challenge western leftist sensibilities.
While the three farm laws announced by Modi government in November 2020 are about
Indian agricultural labor writ large, Bikrum Gill has recently argued in a 2021 talk titled
‘Siege of Delhi’ there is a specific existentialist crisis in Punjab that is animating these
protests; it has been long in the making due to decades of land grabs in Punjab, the lib-
eralisation of the Indian economy beginning in the 1990s, the brutal repression of the
Khalistani movement in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and the current crackdown by the
authoritarian Hindutva anti-Muslim government of manifold forms of dissent.
Gill (2021) also argues that Sikhs are ‘rethinking [our] internalized religious prac-
tices’ in this political organising context such that ‘nothing will be the same again.’ There
has been both a lauding of but also re-politicisation of ‘Sikhi,’ the tenants of Sikhism, as
fundamentally informing the organisation and conduct of the protestors. This hailing
has been especially moving in the Sikh diasporas, where the connection to the protests
is deeply familial, religious, and spiritual, entangled with the traumas of partition and
migration, and marked by the question ‘How do we support from a distance?’ Because of
the strong presence of Sikhism, one might ask, is this a secular protest? It is not exactly
a non-secular protest, and indeed a rigid secular/religious binary opens the way for vili-
fication of the protests as a revival of the Khalistani separatist movement from the 1970s
and 1980s. There are thin lines to navigate: whether and how to protest as a Sikh without
being dismissed as a terrorist; how to respond to myriad forms of Indian state violence,
including murders, disappearances, incarceration, and sexual assaults of female leaders,
without being stereotyped as ‘warriors’; how to resist the neoliberalism of the Indian
nation-state without being vilified as traitorous/seditious.
There has been much lauding in Sikh forums about the praxis of Langar at the pro-
tests, the communal cooking, feeding, and eating that is part of a broader philosophy
of Seva, or service to others. From the advent of Sikhism, Langar was envisioned as an
anti-caste practice, including the caste of women. In practice the commitment to these
ideals varies and does not mitigate the fact that caste differences are sutured through
land to the violence of the owner-laborer relationship. Nor does it minimise the effects
of Sikh patriarchy, and the sheer fact that women own less than one percent of the land
they had been fighting for. At the protests female leaders, union organisers, and activists
were lauded, highlighting how women are central to agrarian economies. Simultaneously
there was the denouncing of any self-declared feminist approaches that point out the
patriarchal violence against women in Punjab. Claims abounded about the flourishing
gender equality evidenced by private toilets, free menstrual products, and women-spe-
cific health care services even as sexual assaults amongst the protestors took place. As one
prominent example, Trolly Times, the independent newspaper spontaneously launched
by the protestors in order to challenge mainstream Indian reporting, announced that a
member of their team, Varun Chouhan, had been multiply accused of sexual harassment
and would be departing from their collective.

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 Navyug Gill (2021) and other commentators have situated Langar as a form of con-
viviality that challenges hierarchical caste congregations. But the kinds of reorientations
of gender that Langar poses have been far less commented upon. Langar is part of the
sustainability of protest spaces, feeding not only thousands of protestors daily, but also
neighboring communities. It is also what might otherwise be seen as mutual aid: it is not
charity, a form of pooling resources, nor crisis intervention. Rather Langar is a mode of
envisioning more egalitarian forms of communalising on the affective, corporeal, and
ecological levels: a venerable Sikh institution, a theological philosophy, a conceptual
space, and a horizon of becoming rooted in the ongoing work of relationality.4
During the winter 2020 and the spring and summer of 2021, Sikh twitter was abuzz
with IRT updates on the Farmers’ Protests. Caste-ist harassment of queer, trans, and
Dalit Sikhs by ‘cishetero Jatt Sikhs’ at the onset of the protests intensified in February
2020. These supporters of and participants in the Farmers’ Protests espoused a ‘Jatt-
Sikh pride’ through vicious queerphobic and transphobic anti-caste vitriol. In response,
Manu Kaur and manmit singh chahal (2021), a non-binary Dalit and a trans Sikh respec-
tively, penned a series of brilliant articles condemning the online harassment and noting
failure to realise the radical potential of Sikhi within the terms of Sikhi itself.5 They re-
minded devotees that ‘Sikhi annihilated caste but this was not a passive proclamation but
an active disavowal of the caste system through instituting various measures like pangat
[sitting together], sangat [true congregation], and langar.’ Further, to the Sikh communi-
ty they reassert that ‘equality and liberation does not rest in mere statements or the lack
thereof, but instead in an active commitment to dismantling casteist cisheteronormativi-
ty.’ Elsewhere they term this normativity the ‘brahminical jatt cisheteropatriarchal order.’
This entwinement of caste and gender exemplifies the Mobius strip Rao describes. It also
reveals a dialectical process reliant on deepening the contradictions internal to these
antagonisms rather than folding into a dominant fundamentalist narrative. Manu and
manmit support the protests without idealisation, and desire to render productive the
schisms and incommensurability of political antagonisms rather than remain compla-
cent with a presumption that a fantasised ‘unity’ must be maintained at all costs.
What I find so compelling about these interventions is that they do not profess that
Langar is a queer practice, rather they argue that langar, pangat, and sangat are principles
of Sikhi cohered only through the multiplicities of gender and the abolition of caste and
must be practiced as such. Such queer, trans, and Dalit response to Sikh fundamentalist
nationalism is not based on a counter(homo)nationalism, nor on a homoromanticism
that would blame colonial rule for present day trans- and homophobia by romanticising
a pre-colonial, phobia-free religious practice. Manu and manmit are not arguing for ‘re-
covering’ queer and trans subjects, but on drawing on practices and tenets that already
exist within the folds of Sikhi and have yet to be realised to their fullness. The radical
force of queer, trans, and Dalit Sikhs emanates already from within, not from outside or
externally to the Sangat. Their demand is not (only) one for the recognition, inclusion,
and visibility of certain identities, as it is for an ethical-theological orientation to these
identities, an example of the difference between identity politics and a politics of iden-
tity. In other words, there is no true Sikhi without queer, and trans Dalit Sikhs. This has
10 of 21 vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023 e20220007 Puar & Deylami
been condemned as a blasphemous statement, and yet the religious principles confirm it
to be true. In a final acknowledgment to that which is already there, Manu and manmit
hail the queer, trans, and non-binary bodies at the protests, however defined, marked or
unmarked: ‘..may our Waheguru [god] have kirpa [blessing] on the caste oppressed and
queer and trans farmers fighting within the Kisaan Morcha [Farmers’ movement] right
now’ (chahal and Kaur 2021).
The anti-casteism politics among these queer, trans, non-binary Dalit Sikhs are less
wedded to the philosophies and legacy of Ambedkar, who once considered becoming
Sikh, than to the anti-caste tenets of gender-nondiscrimination embedded in the theolo-
gy of Sikhi. Thinking alongside Rao’s commitment to a queer anti-caste politics, I wonder
how these two strands of anti-caste commitments, Ambedkar and Sikhi, might together
further open the possibilities for Rao’s conceptualisation of the politics of ‘backwardness’
which he argues is conditioned by a refusal against the onward march of modernity. My
query is about both history and philosophy, but it is also a speculative one. That is not to
deny elements of Sikh history that lend to archival reclamation, for example in the play-
ful musings of whether the Gurus were queer. Rather than a relation to tradition and mo-
dernity, I read their demands as desire for a utopian radical Sikh horizon which would
not be possible without achieving the dissolution of caste and gender differences. Radical
Sikhi therefore would only strengthen struggles for more sustainable agrarian futures by
nurturing a sangat multiply invested in such futures. In fact, as Manu and manmit make
clear in their missives, Langar and other tenets of Seva cannot be truly practiced without
challenging casteism, queerphobia and transphobia, or without recognising how queer,
trans, and Dalit lives have been integral to these world-making institutions of Sikhi (cha-
hal and Kaur 2021). Far from being ‘distractions’ from the anti-neoliberal and anti-capi-
talist thrust of the Farmers’ Protests, this queer, trans, and Dalit vision of radical Sikhi is
at the heart of an evolved resistance movement.

Rethinking Homonationalisms e20220007 vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023 11 of 21

The Disoriented Grammars of the State
Shirin Deylami

In September of 2007, then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was invited to Columbia

University (US) for an engagement with the university community. When asked about
the death penalty for homosexuality in Iran by an audience member, Ahmadinejad now
infamously proclaimed to the Columbia University audience that, ‘In Iran, we don’t have
homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t
know who has told you we have that.’6 The audience jeered and booed Ahmadinejad and
hundreds of statements were printed proclaiming the backwardness and homophobic
religious extremism of the Iranian government. Many of the responses reflected a com-
mon American liberal homonationalism which utilizes the acceptance of LGBT rights
a litmus test for modernity. This homonationalist framing, consequently, discursively
constructed Iran as the backward anti-modern villain against the progressive liberalism
of the United States. Here the juxtaposition is clear: the US is cast as the homophilic and
progressive Other to Iran’s violent homophobia7 But what was more interesting in this
exchange between Ahmadinejad and his questioners was the way in which Ahmadinejad
affirms the metonym between American identity and homosexual acceptance by articu-
lating the common claim among conservative Islamic regimes in the Middle East that as
a political and social identity ‘homosexuality is Western’ (Rao 2020: 18).8
This assertion by Ahmadinejad is not of his own making. At least since the revo-
lution of 1979, the broader claim about the West’s sexual licentiousness and perversity,
has been long part of the Iranian Islamic regime’s discourse of westoxification (ghar-
bzadeghi)--the claim that the West, both economically and culturally acts as an agent
of toxicity that engulfs the Islamic world. Popularized by the social theorist Jalal al-e
Ahmad, westoxification offers a critique of the global flows of capital and culture and
particularly hones in on the way in which the ideology of the West manifests new sub-
jects who attempt to mimic the West as a way to ensure their own modernity (Ahmad
1984). However, in the hands of the Ayatollah Khomeini and in the state discourse of the
Islamic Republic many of the political and social narratives around combatting westoxifi-
cation have emphasized its gendered and sexualized dimensions. In this way, to embrace
the sexual licentiousness of the West was no different than accepting the West’s capital-
ist and secularists ideology; both suggested a turning away from true Iranian-Islamic
identity. So, to claim, as Ahmadinejad did, that “there are no homosexuals in Iran” is to
both articulate an aggressive heteronormative national identity and to signal the Islamic
Republic’s ability to fend off sexual westoxification.
Only one year after Ahmadinejad’s rejection of the existence of homosexual-
ity in Iran, the documentary Be Like Others (also distributed as Transsexual in Iran)
(Eshagian 2008) caused a stir at the Sundance Film Festival. While the film provides a
more complex understanding of the ways in which gender and sexuality are fused within
the Iranian state imaginary, many of the Western media narratives expressed awe, and

12 of 21 vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023 e20220007 Puar & Deylami

sometimes confusion, at the so-called progressive policies of the Iranian state when it
came to transgender identity. Not only had transsexuality (the language most often used
in Iran) been approved of by the Islamic State, and supported by an earlier fatwa issued
by the Ayatollah Khomeini,9 but the state was now providing funds and healthcare to
facilitate gender affirmation surgeries. In fact, Iran has one of the highest number of
gender affirmation surgeries in the world and the Iranian government subsidizes half the
cost of these surgeries. How, Western audiences asked, could Iran be so ‘backwards’ on
lesbian and gay rights and so ‘forward’ thinking on supporting transgender citizens at
the same time? Quickly, Western media narratives and analysis, ameliorated this psychic
tension by crediting Iran’s policies on trans-gender/sexuality on the deep homophobia of
the culture and the state. Iran is so homophobic, they contended, that they would rather
force homosexuals into gender transitioning (and pay for the cost!) than recognize the
possibility of queer desire. In this way the common narrative in the West that analyzed
the Iranian stance (1) imagined the Iranian state’s homophobia as both intrinsic to and
wholly motivating its state policies around transsexuality; (2) that there was no differen-
tiation between gay/lesbian and transgender interests and; (3) that transgender activists
had no voice in the Islamic state mandates—they were simply pawns in the Iranian state’s
homophobia. Consequently, the Western homonationalist imaginary was put in order:
Iran’s anti-queerness was autochthonous to the Islamic culture and any actions (even
those deemed by some as progressive) by the state toward queer subjects reflected this
‘backward’ narrative.
But of course, state responses to queerness10 are never that simple and as Rahul Rao
(2020: 15) so compellingly points out in his brilliant new book, Out of Time: The Queer
Politics of Postcoloniality, we must understand queerness as a becoming that is mediated
through and with discourses of nationalism, postcolonial identification and history in,
against and through the state. So that just as one, in the West and in Iran, might think
that they know exactly how the Iranian Islamic state might respond to the fact of queer-
ness--through both erasure, violence and as a metonym for westernization--we also, si-
multaneously, see the avowedly Islamic state embrace other queer forms like transgender
identity. How does Iran make space for these two responses at once? And how might
Iran’s experience with and refusal of westoxification shape both state and activist ap-
proaches to queer freedom? What Rahul Rao’s new work does is to give us a framework
and method to think about this question in a provocatively new way by challenging his
readers to think through the complexity of queer identification and acceptance in the
context of postcolonial time.
There is no doubt that that the rampant homophobia of the Islamic state continues
to pathologize, dismiss, and punish homosexuals in Iran and that simultaneously, the
Islamic Republic has been growing a biopolitical apparatus of state supported gender
affirmation surgeries. This apparatus not only legitimizes certain forms of being trans-
gender but it also cultivates a social and political life that affirms heteronormativity in
the name of Islam. The question that I wish to explore, with Rao’s thinking as my guide,
is, how we might come to understand the relationship of state sanctioned medical tran-
sitioning and its relationship to Iran’s stance on queerness as part of what Rao, following
Rethinking Homonationalisms e20220007 vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023 13 of 21
Hortense Spillers, has called the ‘foundational grammar of the state?’ This foundational
grammer is the ‘dominant symbolic order, “the ruling episteme”’ through which states
have tried, and failed, to make sense of society (Rao 2020: 214-215). In what follows,
I turn to Rao’s (2020: 215) important intervention to think about the ways in which
‘confronted with the fact of queerness, institutions respond in ways that betray the per-
sistence of their dominant grammars’ by thinking through the complexity of the Iranian
state’s response to homosexuality and transgender identity and its relationship to westox-
ification. Further, I wish to examine the ways in which ‘queer difference struggles to make
space for itself’ (Rao 2020: 16) in the differing ways in which Iranians themselves engage
with the fact of (their) queerness and the fear of and fight against westoxification.
In Out of Time, Rao situates the ways in which the colonial past, the postcolonial
present, and the desires of critical futurity are sutured together by queer activists in
attempts to instantiate and make possible queer freedom. Further, he argues that this
queerness is always mediated by the state’s articulation and response to the fact of queer-
ness. For Rao, the use of the colonial past is contextualized, reinvented and sometimes
refused in order to bring forth varying visions of queer futures that both map and re-
imagine the state’s vision of itself. This means that, in various moments and in varying
contexts, queer constituencies might reinterpolate the colonial past in homoromantic
(homophobia as an external invention) instead of homonationalist ways. Looking to
the work and discourses of Ugandan queer activists, for example, Rao shows the ways in
which the cause of homophobia and the state violence done against queers is anchored
in the influence of the West, especially American Christian churches, rather than its own
cultural history of homophobia. This homoromanticism relocates the homophobia of
Uganda to the West and its neo-colonial relationships thus challenging the homonation-
alism that articulates LGBTQ rights and freedoms as reflective of the modernity and pro-
gressivism of the West, and homophobia as indicative of the antimodern backwardness
of the African East. But just as queer futures are reimagined through an engagement with
the past and present of coloniality so too is the rejection of queerness in the name of cul-
tural authenticity and anticolonialism. So in stark contrast to Ugandan activists, Rao also
traces the ways in which the Ugandan Anglican clergy’s rejection of homosexuality was
also steeped in a broader desire to reject a neocolonialism of faith they saw as inflicted
upon them by their American counterparts in the Anglican Church. So too do nationalist
narratives play into the ways in which queerness is imagined by state actors and leaders
in Uganda. What Rao deftly concludes is that the conflicting narratives, both historical
and political, of the Ugandan state, its clergy and its queer activists offer competing and
contrasting accounts of the origins and causes of anti-homosexual sentiment. At stake
in tracing out this complex narrative is to show the reader that the binary divide instan-
tiated by often Western homonationalist discourses are far more complicated and messy.
The articulation of and rejection of queerness, then, is grounded in broader discourses
of colonial memory and visions of a postcolonial identity and future.
How do experiences of the colonial past, and the concomitant invocation of mem-
ory, seep into and frame the present and future of queerness? This to me is the essen-
tial question that Rao’s book wishes to explore and one in which I would like to apply
14 of 21 vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023 e20220007 Puar & Deylami
to post-revolutionary Iran. While Iran did not experience colonization like India and
Uganda—Rao’s primary examples—it is clear that the Islamic Republic’s rejection of
westoxification was grounded in its deeply fraught relationship with the US and the UK.
In turn, this rejection of westoxification was instantiated in discourses of proper sexuality
against what was imagined as the West’s overt embracing of sexual desire outside of the
confines of heterosexual marriage. Khomeini imagined any form of ‘excessive’ or ‘licen-
tious’ sexuality as debilitating for the Islamic subject and for the Islamic nation. While he
often focused on the publicity and extravagances of hyper-(hetero)sexuality, the current
Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei describes homosexuality ‘as the worst form of moral de-
generation,’ that is ravaging the West and likens it to one step away from the acceptance
of incest (Khamenei 2016). Thus, in the Iranian Islamic state imaginary, the West’s
so-called sexual perversity has the capacity to infect Iran as it did during the reign of the
Shah Reza Pahlavi, whose close relationship to the United States and desire to “western-
ize” Iran caused much anger.11 As Janet Afari and Kevin B. Anderson (2005: 161) argue,
There is... a long tradition in nationalist movements of consolidat-
ing power through narratives that affirm patriarchy and compulso-
ry heterosexuality, attributing sexual abnormality and immorality
to a corrupt ruling elite that is about to be overthrown and/or is
complicit with foreign imperialism. Not all the accusations leveled
against the [the deposed shah of Iran, and his] Pahlavi family and
their wealthy supporters stemmed from political and economic
grievances. A significant portion of the public anger was aimed
at their ‘immoral’ lifestyle. There were rumors that a gay lifestyle
was rampant at the court. The shah’s prime minister, Amir Abbas
Hoveyda, was said to have been a homosexual. The satirical press
routinely lampooned him for his meticulous attire, the purple or-
chid in his lapel, and his supposed marriage of convenience. The
shah himself was rumored to be bisexual.

From Afary and Anderson’s recounting, we can see that the revolutionary discourse
around the Shah Pahlavi functioned to metonymically connect queerness with Western
imperialism (westoxification). Consequently, the rejection of homosexuality coincided
with and helped constitute the rejection of the Shah Pahlavi’s power and concomitantly
the power of the United States and Great Britain. However, we should not limit this
metonym to the time of the Shah, for we can see the traces of this convergence between
westoxified political power and sexuality in contemporary Iranian state discourses about
homosexuality. In the revolutionary era, the answer to the overtly sexualized westoxified
subject was simultaneously the blockage of Western culture from invading Iran and a
vast disciplinary apparatus of normalization through familial, religious, and state institu-
tions. This disciplinary apparatus not only affirmed patriarchy and compulsory hetero-
sexuality, as Afary and Anderson (2005) suggest, but it also proclaimed excessive sexual
desire as antithetical to Islam. ‘Islam stops all lust,’ proclaimed Khomeini (1980: 30) and
for the Islamic clerics the homosexual was (aberrant) lust personified.
Rethinking Homonationalisms e20220007 vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023 15 of 21
 This collusion between westoxification and homosexuality was not limited to the
revolutionary era. In the current moment, too, confronted with the fact of homosex-
uality and the public pressures of the Green movement, gay and lesbian diasporic or-
ganizing, and trans organizing, the Islamic elite continue to recycle the narrative that
homosexuality is Western, all while the Islamic state accommodates gender affirmation
surgeries by mobilizing and making real Khomeini’s fatwa. In fact, the Iranian Islamic
state has developed a complex biopolitical system that sanctifies and accommodates
medical gender affirmation through an interconnected web of religious, medical, gov-
ernmental and familial institutions. At first glance then, it would seem the Western and
homonationalist critics are correct—the Iranian state is encouraging gender transition
in order to erase homosexuality. However, if we take Rao’s model of analysis seriously
then we must engage in thinking about the ways in which the state is both responding to
the international geo-political pressures and histories of westoxification and the internal
activism of queer citizens. The Islamic state’s policy around transgender rights cannot
simply be seen as an apparatus to funnel homosexuals into unwanted surgeries that sim-
ply affirm their binary views on sexuality and gender conformity. Rather the state and
cultural practices of homosexual erasure, the disciplinary narratives of proper hetero-
sexuality, and the historical convergence of ‘excessive sexuality’ and westoxification allow
the state to simultaneously disavow homosexuality (as Western) and claim a progres-
sive accommodation for transgender citizens as a way to challenge the Western imperial
discourse of homonationalism. In this way, the clergy, who are also the most powerful
state actors, are able to reject westoxification and claim a progressive and modern re-
sponse to transgender identity, unlike their Western counterparts. As Farah Jafari notes,
‘Without recognizing criticism of their mistreatment of homosexuals, some clergy, such
as Mohammed Mahdi Kariminia, a cleric in the holy city of Qom and one of Iran’s fore-
most proponents of using hormones and surgery to change sex, also boastfully presents
Iran’s self-proclaimed policies on SRS [sex reassignment surgeries] and transsexuals as a
beacon by which human rights can be measured: “One could say that a transsexual’s right
to sex reassignment is an instance of human rights”’ (Jafari 2014: 40). These attempts by
the Iranian Islamic state then are reflections of Rao’s understanding of the foundational
grammars of the state. As the Islamic state performs the sorting function of ‘establishing
the mechanisms of incorporating/quarantining, setting the terms of recognition, and
undergirding the patterns of inclusion and exclusion that are foundational to its institu-
tions’ (Rao 2020: 215), it must also reinvest in, but also re-envision, the gender binaries
and anti-Western narratives that undergird the Islamic state’s identity. In doing so, they
can claim an alternative conception of modernity.
However, it is worth noting that this reinvention of the grammar of the Iranian
state is not solely an effect of the benevolence of clergy and politicians, but is also in
response to trans activists calls for care from the state. As Rao reminds us in his analysis
of the complexity of homonational and homoromantic discourses that emerge in the
postcolony, we must consider the agency of those who are deemed ‘weak’ in the process-
es that make these differing stances possible (Rao 2020: 72). Like the Aravani activists
Rao writes about who mobilize the structures of caste and language of backwardness
16 of 21 vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023 e20220007 Puar & Deylami
in order to gain both rights and substantive goods like housing in India, Iranian trans
activists have relied on a language of vulnerability to engage the clergy and the varying
bureaucratic dimensions of the state (Najmabadi 2014). Likening it to a game of ‘snakes
and ladders,’ Afsaneh Najmabadi shows the way in which trans Iranians articulated a
de-politicized activism that sought entitlements rather than pursuing a rights discourse
in order to make their lives more livable. In addition, they actively sought to codify
both legal and medical distinctions from homosexuality (Najmabadi 2014: 173). This
type of engagement articulated trans activists themselves as vulnerable citizens in need
of governmental and religious protection and care from a society that sees them as ho-
mosexuals. In this way, the trans activists strategically relied on religious and medical
discourses in contrast to an often- Western narrative of LGBT rights discourse that as
Joseph Massad has so critically argued has incited a discourse that furthers both rigid
categories of sexuality but also their persecution (Massad 2007). My intention here is
not to make judgments on these biopolitical developments nor on the strategies of these
activists but rather to turn back to Rao in thinking through how the claims of trans
vulnerability and even illness function to build a queer future for these activists and
how in that activism they must also delineate their practices, strategies and identities
against a vision of homosexuality as Western. In turn, the Islamic state’s capacity to care
for its transsexual population allows their own proclamation of modernity. These com-
plex, sometimes oppositional and sometimes concurrent narratives, help to shape the
selfhood of these transactivists and Iranian identity. Importantly, as Rao so distinctively
shows these identities and their making are always in a temporal flux. So as Iran and
Iranians take on different positions towards westoxification there is no doubt that we will
see shifting meaning and modalities of power.
How might we understand the confluence of homonationalism, homoromanticism
and post-colonial state identity at play in the Iranian context? As Rao so deftly implores
us, we must understand the activities of both individuals and states as reflective of a dia-
lectical relationship in which queerness (but also national identity) is both made and is
always in process of becoming. This viewing allows us to dismantle the vision of homon-
ationalism that sees the West as the progressive ideal against the homophobia of the East
but it also challenges us not to romanticize the postcolony. Instead, we must embrace the
disorienting nature of queerness in the postcolony.

Notes
1 [Note by Puar] For an analysis of the historical arc of Islamophobia beginning with the 1857 Indian
Mutiny, see the brilliant Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror 1817-2020 by Anjuli
Fatima Raza Kolb (2021).
2 [Note by Puar] For an analysis of the elitism of the US academy and how it conditions and impacts
queer theoretical knowledge formations see the trenchant Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the
University (Brim 2020).
3 [Note by Puar] For a sampling of academic and activist commentaries, see Ravinder Kaur (2020);
Navyug Gill (2021); a forthcoming book by Bikrum Sing Gill titled ‘Race, Nature, and Accumulation: A
Decolonial Political Ecological Analysis of Land Grabbing’; Harsha Walia (2021); Amadeep S. Dhillon’s

Rethinking Homonationalisms e20220007 vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023 17 of 21

 recent work in New Socialist, especially ‘Understanding Kissan Andolan’ (Dhillon 2021); Nivkaran
Natt’s contributions to the Trolley Times, [Link] an interview from last year with
Nodeep Kaur published on the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty website, [Link]
story/2021-11-23/nodeep-kaur-farmers-and-workers-struggle-beat-modi; additional resources can be
found on the Panth-Punjab Project, [Link]
4 [Note by Puar] See Bal Sokhi-Bulley’s forthcoming article, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life: On Foucault,
Spirituality and Sikh Praxis.’
5 [Note by Puar] manmit singh chahal and Manu Kaur published a three part series of essays in the online
magazine, Kaur Life. The first was published 22 January 2021 under the title, ‘When Will Caste-Oppressed
and Queer and Trans Folks Find Liberation in Sikh Spaces?’ (chahal and Kaur 2021).
6 [Note by Deylami] A few days later Ahmadinejad’s office rejected the interpretation of his comments,
arguing that he did not mean that there are no homosexuals in Iran but that homosexuality as a social and
political phenomenon is not as prevalent as it is in the United States. Regardless, his comments created
quite the furor among Western (mostly American) audiences.
7 [Note by Deylami] Juxtaposing American constitutional freedoms for gays and lesbians against the
extremism of Iranian policies and Ahmadinejad’s refusal to even acknowledge gay and lesbian Iranians,
Columbia Law School’s Sex and Gender Clinic (2007) put out a press release that read, “Iran’s constitution
provides no protection for LBGT Iranians, unlike in the United States, where the Supreme Court
recognized in its landmark 2003 decision, Lawrence v. Texas, that, at a minimum, the U.S. Constitution
prohibits criminalizing sodomy. Iranians discovered to be gay have suffered intense discrimination,
torture and even state-sponsored execution.” Invoking the homonationalist discourse so common in
liberal American circles, the Sex and Gender Clinic recognized yet elided that these legal freedoms in
the US had only been established four years prior. The focus then became about the ways in which Iran
rejected modernity. See [Link]
presidents-anti-gay-remarks.
8 [Note by Deylami] Surely Ahmadinejad does not think that same-sex desire is a Western construct.
Rather his claim about the Westerness of homosexuality suggests that the political and social approval of
homosexuality and homosexual identity is a Western construct that rejects the ‘truth of Islam.’
9 [Note by Deylami] The original fatwa by Khomeini, issued in 1967, argued that from a religious
perspective there should be no restrictions for hermaphrodites for sex reassignment surgery. In 1985,
Khomeini revised that ruling by including those with diagnoses of gender dysphoria.
10 [Note by Deylami] I use queerness here as an expansive term that signifies both sexual desire and
challenges to sexual and gender normativity. Of course, these forms of identification are specific and
diverse but also work similarly in their challenge to forms of normativity.
11 [Note by Deylami] For a much more detailed and compelling account of the relationship between
modernization, westernization and sexual desire see Najmabadi (2005).

References
Afary, J and K Anderson. 2005. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Ahmad, J. 1984. Occidentosis: A Plagure from the West. Jakarta: Mizan Press.
Be Like Others. 2008. [Film]. Tanaz Eshaghian. Dir. Canada: Forties B.
Brim, M. 2020. Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University. Durham: Duke University
Press.
chahal, M S and M Kaur. 2021 ‘When Will Caste-Oppressed and Queer and Trans Folks Find
Liberation in Sikh Spaces?’ Kaur Life [online]. 22 January. At [Link]
when-will-caste-oppressed-and-queer-and-trans-folks-find-liberation-in-sikh-spaces/.

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Dhillon, A S. 2021. ‘Understanding Kissan Andolan.’ New Socialist, October 16. At: [Link]
[Link]/understanding-kisaan-andolan/
Duggan, L. 2003. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the attack on
Democracy. New York: Beacon Press.
Gill, B. 2021. “Siege of Delhi: Geopolitics and Resistance.” Panth-Punjab Project [online]. 27
February. At [Link]
Gill, B S. Forthcoming. ‘Race, Nature, and Accumulation: A Decolonial Political Ecological
Analysis of Land Grabbing.’
Gill, N. 2021. ‘Gramsci at the Delhi Border: Indian Farmers and the Revolution against Inevitability.’
Antipode Online, 14 June. At: [Link]
Hage, G. 2017. Is Racism an Environmental Threat? Malden: Polity Press.
Jafari, F. 2014. ‘Transsexuality Under Surveillance in Iran: Clerical Control of Khomeini’s Fatwas.’
Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 10(2): 31-51.
Kaur, R. 2020. Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-
Century India. Stanfrod: Stanford University Press.
Khamenei, A. 16 May 2016. [Accessed April 15, 2021] Available from: [Link]
media/15155/‫رادید‬-‫سیئر‬-‫و‬-‫یاضعا‬-‫سلجم‬-‫ناگربخ‬-‫یربهر‬
Khomeini, R. 1980. Selected Messages and Speeches of Imam Khomeini. Tehran: Hamdami
Foundation.
Kolb, A F R. 2021. Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror 1817-2020. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Massad, J. 2007. Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Najmabadi, A. 2005. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties
of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press
Najmabadi, A. 2013. Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Puar, J K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
Rao, R. 2020. Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Walia, H. 2021. Border and Rule Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.
Chicago: Haymarket Books.

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About the authors
Jasbir K. Puar is Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies
at Rutgers University, where she has been a faculty member since 2000. Her most re-
cent book is The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017) published with
Duke University Press in the series ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise that she
co-edits with Mel Chen. Puar is the author of award-winning Terrorist Assemblages:
Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), which has been translated into Spanish and
French and re-issued in an expanded version for its 10th anniversary (December 2017).

Shirin S. Deylami is Professor of Political Science and affiliate faculty in Women, Gender
and Sexuality Studies at Western Washington University (USA). Her research interests
are at the intersection of feminist theory, Islamic political thought and popular culture.
Her work has been published in the journals Polity, Women’s Studies, International
Feminist Journal of Politics and more. Her new edited textbook Globalizing Political
Theory is forthcoming with Routledge Press. She is currently working on a new project
that looks at how ugly feelings of shame, rage and pity build solidarity within national
and transnational feminist movements.

20 of 21 vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023 e20220007 Puar & Deylami

 Fórum Out of Time, de Rahul Rao, Parte II:
Repensando o homonacionalismo

Resumo: Neste Fórum, seis acadêmicos refletem sobre o recente livro de Rahul
Rao, Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality, a partir de outras geogra-
fias, temas e possibilidades radicais. A Parte II explora a análise do homonaciona-
lismo em diálogo com Out of Time de Rao. Jasbir Puar, que cunhou o termo em um
trabalho pioneiro anterior, pensa com e contra o livro de Rao sobre as relações en-
tre o homonacionalismo e o que Rao chamou de homocapitalismo. Puar também
explora como a política de casta e gênero do Radical Sikhi durante os protestos
dos agricultores na Índia (2020-2021) pode servir como uma fonte alternativa de
inspiração, acompanhando os Dalits queer e trans do livro de Rao. Shirin Deylami
reflete sobre o trabalho de Rao explorando as gramáticas desorientadas do Estado
islâmico iraniano. Especificamente, Deylami analisa a maneira pela qual o dis-
curso da oxigenação ocidental influenciou e desafiou as respostas divergentes do
Estado às reivindicações transgêneras de cuidados em relação às reivindicações de
direitos de gays e lésbicas.

Palavras-chave: homonacionalismo; homocapitalismo; casta; gênero; queer pós-

-colonial; Irã; Westoxificação

Received on 21 January 2022 and approved for publication on 19 January 2023 (Puar).
Received on 2 June 2021 and approved for publication on 22 July 2022 (Deylami).

[Link]

Rethinking Homonationalisms e20220007 vol. 45(3) Sep/Dec 2023 21 of 21