Jin Haritaworn
Media and Communications Studies Department
Goldsmiths College, London 

(Reino Unido)

The question of sexuality in the ‘war on terror’ has gained academic respectability. Queer discourse no longer ignores how gay rights discourse has joined women’s rights discourse as a source of ideological justification for war in the Middle East and racist backlash and the rollback of migrant citizenship and immigration rights in the West. However, this tendency has been presented as a sole problem of the state, thus leaving intact a notion of an innocent gay subject. 

My paper complicates the debate by positioning queer agency in the ‘war on terror’. Taking the case of Britain and Germany, it documents the participation of gay leaders in this war. Interrogating the coincidence of the war with the entry of some gay subjects into the political mainstream, I re-examine racism and imperialism as enabling factors for gay citizenship. 

This also renders necessary a return to questions of racism and exclusion within the gay movement, and the ways in which the new debates around ‘religion v. sexuality’ serve to contest or repeat the exclusion of queer Muslims and other queers of colour from queer spaces and queer discourses.

About Jin Haritaworn

Jin Haritaworn is a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow in the Media and Communications Studies Department at Goldsmiths College. His current research topics include an exploration of debates on citizenship, civil rights and civil liberties with regard to multiculturalism, women's rights and gay rights, a critical interrogation of the usage of 'ambiguity' and 'border crossing' in queer and postcolonial theory, and changing notions of hybridity in a post-9/11 context of European nationalism. Publications include the co-editing of a special issue on polyamory and non-monogamy in Sexualities (2006, 9(5)), articles in edited volumes such as Geographies of Sexualities (Brown, Browne and Lim, 2007) and Out of Place: Queerness and Raciality (Kuntsmann and Esperanza, forthcoming), and in peer-reviewed journals, including Women’s Studies International Forum (2007, 30(7)) and (all forthcoming) Darkmatter (issue 3 on Postcoloniality and Sexuality), Feminist Theory (special issue on new feminininities, ed. By Rosalind Gill), Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Femina Politica and Sociological Research Online.