laura.fo

The Trials of Culture: Sex and Security in Egypt by Scott Long

Their masked images made their prosecution probably the most internationally famous confrontation between homosexual conduct and the law since the London trial of Oscar Wilde. Yet it is worth reflecting on how those images were received. For an Egyptian audience, surely they depicted shame: the absence-as-evidence of a practice that, never mind speaking its name, did not dare show its face. Many in the West, by contrast, saw the men’s caged anonymity as the seal of injustice. Did the ghost of old stereotypes also obtrude in their dissemination worldwide? There was something almost prurient in the fascination with men who had voluntarily veiled themselves—as if both their behavior and their brutalization had made them obscurely feminine, assimilated them to an antiquated vision of the East as a territory of mysterious invisibilities, where desire was repressed but omnipresent.

…

Yet any narrative of identity and its relationship to rights that relies on a distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic is flawed.

…

The claim to sexual autonomy, the prospect of undisturbed intimacy, are early and easy sacrifices before the reach and the surveillance powers of the security state. Public freedoms follow. The talkers of rights talk are still tentative and uncertain, cowed by the claims of a reified “culture,” afraid to offend. In Egypt and elsewhere—in the US and Europe—many hesitate to sully the cause of human rights by addressing sexuality or defending “deviance.” While the talkers temporize, the wiretaps click and the officers strap on their Kevlar. In the end, all I can say is: you’re next.

I read this in The Columbia Journalism Review and became oddly disturbed. "Oddly," because it's not the horror of the WTC disaster itself that shakes me (I've processed that, I think), but the writer's fixation with the ocean of documents that fell out of the sky that morning. A fixation I share. I was disturbed by it even as it was happening, when I watched the fall on September 11, but it seemed too sickly trivial to even merit comment. But there it is: real horror at the thought of a mass of private papers blasting out of the cubicles where they originated and sailing onto this nightmarish mass of rubble and bodies for everyone to see. I carried home with me three things that I'd snatched at random from the site, the writer says: a memo from Matthew to Jeff about Karen's secretary, the front page of a report on Telecom Strategies for the New Decade, a photograph of a mustachioed man in a tuxedo at a podium. I hate him for this raid. It's not the act of keeping a memento; that doesn't bother me at all. It's the fact that he's seeing what he wasn't meant to see, however trivial. And the owners of those documents have no recourse.

I'm bothered, too, by him knowing that the dead woman he saw fall from the tower was female "because she was wearing a skirt (sea-green) and I could see her legs." He steals in to get a glimpse of her face, and I picture myself in her position, unable to arrange myself, to hitch my skirt down over my slip before being stared at by a stranger. Her humanity ended precisely that instant.

It reminds me of this, which horrified me in the exact same way. I passed that link around for a while and most of my friends responded half-sympathetically with "yeah, men are pigs" or some other casual statement meant to pacify me just enough so that I would shut up about it already. They identified with the hassle of being stalked. "What a hassle." But they – and I admit it, even I – were seeing this woman as "a former nude model." It's hard to get up in arms about someone being launched into the spotlight if we never knew them backstage, when they were still whole and multi-faceted.

But lots of my friends are "former nude models," yet I don't think of them that way because they've never been forced to make it paramount. And they accept that as their entitlement, which I believe it is. But I don't think they understand how tenuous their claim on their own narrative is. Being misrepresented is rarely about someone saying you're this when you're really that. It's a matter of degree: someone takes some small part of you, hacks away the rest, and makes that part all-encompassing, turns it into everything you are. What can you say in your own defense? That you aren't that, when in fact you are? "Yes, but I'm other things, too!" or "I'm that, but, uh, not the way you said it!" are childish retorts. So you're left with silence. Like the woman in the sea-green skirt, legs helplessly exposed for the benefit of some cub reporter, breathing just ten seconds ago, dignity intact.