The War on Terror produced homonationalism, absorbing some gays while marking Muslims deviant

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘homonationalism,’ a coinage worth keeping precisely because it names a real mechanism.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the homonationalism frame hold up outside the US — e.g., in Israel’s ‘pinkwashing’ or European LGBT-vs-Muslim political configurations?
• XREF: Runs parallel to how immigrant/racial groups are used as tokens against other groups — echoes of respectability politics literature.