Sexual-deviance accusations functioned as a state tool to mark Muslims as dangerous

Evidence

The elements identified in these biographic trajectories have bled far beyond the realm of newspaper articles and magazine profiles. They can be detected in the torture techniques, designed specifically to humiliate Muslims, used at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons. Even James Yee, a Chinese American convert to Islam who served as the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo Bay, was accused of being a traitor to the United States and charged with sexual perversion. In 2003, when Yee was returning to the United States from Cuba, a U.S. customs agent found a list of Guantánamo Bay detainees and interrogators in his belongings. Yee was arrested, detained, and charged with espionage and aiding the enemy. He made headline news as yet another Muslim convert who had become un-American. After being placed in solitary confinement for seventy-six days, he was released and the charges were dropped. Yee nevertheless faced lesser charges in the coming months and was portrayed as a sexual pervert: rumors circulated that he was storing pornography on his government computer and that he was an adulterer, tying Islam to sexual hypocrisy and deviance. The case of James Yee is yet another example of how non-normative sexuality is used as a tool to mark Muslims as dangerous and perverse. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1099

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the specific mechanics of how media tropes flowed into actual torture techniques at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib — who explicitly designed humiliation linked to sexual taboo, and what documents or testimony support the causal link?