Zine & Johnson
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By reading Zine and Johnson's articles in conjunction with each other, it becomes clear that it is impossible to separate one's gender or sexual identity from their racialised identity. As Johnson suggests, quare folks cannot afford to exclude even their homophobic family members from their allyship since their experience with race struggles can teach others how to resist many forms of oppression, including homophobia (Johnson 130). White queer studies tends to be dismissive of these forms of knowing and often fails to acknowledge the contributions of non-white people to the LGBT struggle. I relate to Johnson's idea that alliance with homophobic family/community members is important for racialised queer folk, since I often find that I have more in common with other racialised people regardless of gender/sexual identity than I do with white queer people. Racial identity is something that is immediately visible to other people based on the way you look, while queer identity is not necessarily physically apparent and can be hidden. This is an important distinction to make, since white queer folk have the option to protect themselves from identity-based harassment in public that us quare folk do not.
Zine's article sheds more light on how race and gender/sexuality interact with each other when explaining the criticisms that Muslim feminists have of sexism within the Muslim community. Like Zine, many Muslim women have to inhabit the precarious balance between criticising the interpretations of Islamic law that prove harmful to women while also challenging Islamophobic narratives that paint stereotypes of all Muslims as a patriarchal and inherently misogynistic society (Zine 153). White Canadian feminists continue reproducing this image of Muslim women as weak at the hands of their male oppressors, since it does not fit into their conception of the West as the pinnacle of feminist liberation for veiled Muslim women to have any agency of their own right. Both Zine and Johnson thus highlight how racialised identity informs one's experiences of gender and sexuality in completely different ways to how white folks experience the same.