Homonationalism & Gay American Desis post 9/11
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The notion os homonationalism as theorized by Puar, describes the incorporation of LGBTQ+ subjects into nationalist ideologies to reinforce the legitimacy of the nation-state, often at the expense of marginalized groups. In this context the gay American Desis after 9/11, homonationalism manifested through the intersection of queerness, race and post-9/11 Islamophobia. Post 9/11, South Asian queer diasporic communities in the US faced the dual stigmatization of being racialized as "terrorist bodies" and navigating the expectations of queer exceptionalism. This duality reinforced the pressure for gay Desis to adopt and project a normatively "acceptable" Americanness. For example, queer South Asians were sometimes positioned as "model minorities" within the LGBTQ+ movement, reflecting an assimilationist impulse that prioritized their Americanness while distancing themselves from stigmatized "terrorist" identities. A Pakistani Muslim queer man quoted in the text noted how his sexuality "took a back seat to [his] ethnicity," (Puar, 173) explaining how the racialized surveillance of South Asians reoriented priorities within queer activism toward navigating Islamophobia and racial profiling. Puar's concept of the "monster-terrorist-fag" amalgam encapsulates the ways in which queer South Asians were constructed as both potential allies of the state (through queer exceptionalism) and as racialized threats. Also, the turbaned body, frequently conflated with terrorist imagery, became a focal point of fear and exclusion of Sikhs. For queer Desis, the turban complicated their potential inclusion in the queer liberal subject by keeping them as both culturally "backward" and racially suspect. Their queerness was instrumentalized to affirm their Americanness, even as their racial and cultural identities positioned them as suspect in the war on terror.