Reading torture photos as homophobia erases the racial and gendered reality of the victims

Evidence

Jasbir Paur offers an example that illustrates the outcome of analysing one system at the expense of another. Those who viewed the Abu Ghraib photos of Iraqi men forced to simulate having sex with each other as evidence of rampant homophobia (the photos show homosexuality as degradation) missed the bodies of the tortured Iraqis themselves. Paur insists that both gender (Iraqi men are being made to feel like women) and race (Iraqi bodies are the ones marked as degenerate) are effaced if we concentrate on sexuality as a discrete system. In this respect, Paur’s argument is in line with scholars of colonialism who trace how colonizers sought to establish their claim to ownership of the land and conquest of its occupants, not only through the rape of women but also through the feminizing of colonial men. As Revathi Krishnaswamy has shown in her study of colonial rule in India, ‘the real goal of feminization is effeminization – a process in which colonizing men use women/womanhood to delegitimize, discredit, and disempower colonized men.’ Several systems are in operation in the process of empire and they give content to each other. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 150

Categorization

• XREF: Offers a concrete method illustration of this book’s interlocking claim that race, gender and sexuality are mutually constitutive rather than additive.