Gay-rights rhetoric was coopted to justify the war on terror.

Evidence

Jasbir Puar claims that homosexuality has been regarded in the United States as a non-normative sexuality but that this has changed through the War on Terror. Puar argues that certain homosexual bodies were folded into the national imaginary and national agendas during the War on Terror, producing what she terms “homonationalism”-the ways in which some homosexual identities came to inhabit a normative form that ultimately supported heteronormativity, as well as the national and transnational political agendas of U.S. imperialism. Within this configuration of normative and non-normative homosexualities, the terrorist-and by default, gay or lesbian Muslims-are configured as improperly sexual, in contrast to the newly formed homonormativity: In the never-ending displacement of the excesses of perverse sexualities to the outside, a mythical and politically and historically overstated externality so fun- damental to the imaginative geographies at stake, the (queer) terrorist regenerates the civilizational missives central to the reproduction of racist heterosexist U. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1047 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Bush used women’s rights and democracy to justify war — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 455; Gay rights were co-opted to legitimize the war on terror; The War on Terror produced homonationalism, absorbing some gays while marking Muslims deviant — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 1047 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• The War on Terror produced homonationalism, absorbing some gays while marking Muslims deviant #expands (0.93) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1047
• Co-opting gay rights rhetoric into national identity racialized Muslims as civilizational others. #expands (0.92)