Week 4 Day 2

 Post 4

This week’s readings by the authors, Afsaneh Najmabadi,  "Types, Acts, or What? Regulation of Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iran" and the piece "Beyond the Americas: Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Analysis?” help the readers understand the applications and understandings behind certain labels and experiences. Right off the bat, Najmabadi’s works did an excellent job at explaining the way that certain labels in different places around the world can carry “western” notions of thinking and indirectly influence the communities that already exist there, acting as tools of imperialism. With this conversation, Gregory Mitchell’s piece from our second week of readings about Brazil, provides similar examples of the way sex is constructed via morality and manhood.

In "Types, Acts, or What? Regulation of Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iran," I found that the findings of body part preference (i.e. vagina and anus), rather than the person were often referenced to when discussing pleasure, “Contrary to my prior assumption that a preference for anal intercourse meant a preference for young male adolescents, Vali Khan articulates nothing related to ‘an object of desire,’ male or female, but something that reads more like a desire for a particular body part, as if this part was dissected from the entirety of the person’s body,” (Types 278). Here Najmabadi is explaining her own biases when encountering sex between people and the assumption that a preference for anal, simply meant an attraction for other males. However, as the author unpacks her own preconceived notions of sexuality and gender, she finds that in this case, preference for a body part is not associated with a specific gender or sexuality. This thought process is very much tied to “western” thought on sexuality, as oftentimes a sexual preference is automatically linked with a label or general assumption of the people you are attracted to. While reading this, I couldn’t help but step back from my own creation of sexuality and reckon with exactly what the author is trying to touch on (stated very simply on my behalf), about the differences in which we all approach sexuality, gender, and sexual desires. Later on in the text, the author talks about the ways in which penetration is regulated, similarly seen in Gregory Mitchell’s “TurboConsumersTM in Paradise: Tourism, Civil Rights, and Brazil’s Gay Sex Industry” with how the role of the man in penetration with another man is critical to their perception in society. 

“Tourists were well versed in sociological and anthropological views of ‘Latin homosexuality,’ in which one’s sexual identity is determined by one’s role in sex as either active (ativo) or passive (passivo). In much of Latin America, ostensibly normal men (i.e., heterosexual; literally normal) with wives and girlfriends are free to have sex with homosexual men without compromising their masculinity or sexual identity so long as they are ativo,” (Mitchell 669).

“Correspondingly, what was considered socially unacceptable and a sign of unmanhood was for an adult man to be penetrated by another man,” (Types 280). 

These two quotes from separate texts highlight a continuity in Brazil and Iran over the view of roles when these sexual acts are being committed. The role of the “active” is deemed more respectable than those who are penetrated in acts of anal penetration and are still seen as being able to retain their manhood. This parallel highlights a shared view of certain acts and their “levels of morality.”

"Beyond the Americas: Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Analysis?” helped to deconstruct a lot of the views that I have over the concepts of gender and sexuality, helping me to break away for a moment from the way that these two have been perceived and approached from within the United States. Najmabadi ruminates on various questions throughout the text that forced me to pause and think about my response and then break down why I was responding in the way that I did. A lot of these questions, with, “How do we approach the problem of gender’s historical and narrative effect for its own production as a binary?” (Beyond 12) as an example of one of their more broad questions proposed, left me feeling a bit hopeless as I struggled to come up with even a few thoughts as a response. I also appreciated the breakdown of how certain language and approaches to topics can uphold heteronormativity and thinking about how the term “same-sex” can be seen on varying occasions. Overall, this work touched on the continuing theme of the varying ways that sexuality and gender are constructed, perceived, and enforced in different cultures and places in the world. While “Beyond the Americas” left me a bit frazzled, it helped expand my understanding and leaves me hoping that someday these questions will be answered and reminded me that our approaches to gender and sexuality are ever-changing and require constant criticism in order to grow.