On Queer Amnesia

Association for Queer Anthropology

Elijah Adiv Edelman and Ryan Thoreson
August 4, 2017

The AQA exists as a dedicated home for queer anthropology within the larger discipline. Nonetheless, in these pages, on the AN website, and in
their own work, AQA section members have critically situated recent work on gender, sexuality, and queerness in a broader political context. As
leaders hawk authoritarian and xenophobic populism globally, broadening our analytical and ethnographic outlook is a particularly urgent task.

In the early hours of June 12th, 2016, Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old, US-bornsecurity
guard, entered Orlandos Pulse nightclub on Latin night, an evening catering to LGBTQ
latinx communities, armed with an assault-style ri e and a handgun. Between 2 a.m.
and 5:15 a.m.when police reported Mateen deadhe shot 102 people, 49 of whom
would die.

The following month, the Washington Bladeself-proclaimed Americas LGBT News

Sourceran a story headlined, Trump Makes History with LGBT Inclusion in
Acceptance Speech. Indeed, Donald Trumpthen the GOP presidential candidatedid
make reference to the LGBTQ community at the Republican National Convention.
Trump speci cally asserted that 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by
an Islamic terrorist, locating danger within hateful foreign ideology. Trumps
commentary was dubious in that Mateen, both at the time and after the fact, had no
a liation with any Islamic terrorist cells and was not clearly motivated by Islamic

Post-Pulse shooting protest in NYC. Ryan Richard Thoreson

 Post-Pulse shooting protest in NYC. Ryan Richard Thoreson terrorist ideologies. And, signi cantly, Trump did not explain how his administration
would actually protect LGBTQ rights. Indeed, his campaign promises and the GOP
platform at the RNC evinced a deep-rooted hostility toward sexual rights and social justice. Laudatory references to Trumps overtures to LGBTQ
peopleincluding by LGBTQ people themselvesre ect a larger socio-political trend toward mainstream gay and lesbian complicity in forgetting
that the rights and lives of queer, trans, and other sexually liminal persons are gravely endangered by the rise of populist ideologies that claim to
support an imaginary LGBTQ community. They also fail to acknowledge the demonization of other communities, particularly Muslims and
immigrants, in these nods toward LGBTQ equality.

The strategic embrace of gay and lesbian rights has become an emerging feature of right-wing populist movements around the globe, and most
notably in Western Europe. In the Netherlands, the late gay politician Pim Fortuyn took aggressive positions against Islam and Muslim immigration,
a position extended in the present day by Geert Wilders. In France, Marine Le Pens National Front adopts similar tactics, positioning Muslims as
a threat to womens rights and LGBTQ rights. To this list we could add the UK Independence Party, the Austrian Freiheitliche Partei sterreichs,
the Swedish Sverigedemokraterna, or the Swiss Schweizerische Volkspartei and Union Dmocratique du Centre. In the refugee crisis, a putative
concern for women and LGBTQ people has been widely taken up by right-wing movements across Europe as a more progressive justi cation for
exclusion.

The mobilization of sexual rights in the name of neoconservative foreign policy is not
new. During the Bush administration, hawks cited the rights of Afghan and Iraqi women
to justify invasion and occupation. Homonationalism, in this context, builds on
homonormativity and is contingent upon the segregation and disquali cation of racial-
sexual others from the national imaginary (Puar 2007). This logic underlies gay and
lesbian disregard of immigrant rights, trans rights, and the rights of any body or nation-
state deemed Muslim. This kind of exceptionalisman amnesia of historical and even
continued violence against communities deemed Otheris present in both populist
ideology and within gay and lesbian support of these regimes.

In its earliest days, Trumps administration has institutionalized Islamophobia in laws,

policies, and practices, and begun dismantling the few established protections for
queer and trans communities. The Departments of Justice and Education have tossed
guidance a rming that Title IXs prohibition on sex discrimination includes

Members of No Justice No Pride blocking DC Prides parade route in

Members of No Justice No Pride blocking DC Prides parade route in
protest of scal sponsorship and promotion of bomb
manufactures, companies subsidizing oil pipelines and other
companies. Drew Ambrogi of No Justice No Pride
discrimination on the basis of gender identity, leaving transgender and gender non-
conforming students vulnerable to harassment and discrimination. In March, Trump
revoked the Obama-era Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces order, which safeguarded LGBT
employees from harassment and discrimination.

Amnesiac gays and lesbians in support of violently nationalistic and anti-Islamic governance produce the conditions that render death and violence
against some queer and trans bodies acceptable, if not also expected. It is through these conditions that mainstream gay and lesbian media can
amplify Trumps demonization of Mateens subjectivity as a racialized, potentially queered Other, while failing to foreground Trumps actual
campaign promises of white nationalism, anti-immigrant, anti-disabled, anti-Islam, anti-woman and anti-poor policies. To adopt such a hypnotically
powerful brand of gay rights that forgets, quite literally, so many other queer/ed bodies, is precisely how, and why, the rise of radical populism is
both unthinkable and entirely plausible.

Elijah Adiv Edelman is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rhode Island College.

Ryan Richard Thoreson is an independent scholar with Human Rights Watch.

Elijah Adiv Edelman(elijah.edelman@gmail.com) and Ryan Thoreson(ryan.thoreson@gmail.com) are the contributing editors for the
Association for Queer Anthropology.

Cite as: Edelman, Elijah Adiv, and Ryan Thoreson. 2017. On Queer Amnesia.Anthropology Newswebsite, August 4, 2017. doi: 10.1111/AN.534

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