Histories of Muslim-Arab Sexual Diversity: Between Homoerotic Practices, Homophobia and Homocolonialist Hegemony

Based on decades of research conducted through life history narratives collected among Syrians, the article outlines the history of recent changes in male homosexual imaginaries and practices, identifying two historical-epistemological configurations: the first, in Syria, between 1970 and 2000, based on ‘fluid’ homoerotic practices, enacted in private and not categorized into homonormative frameworks; the second, in the diaspora in Turkey, shaped under the influence of Western homonormative discourse from 2000 to 2024. Only apparently opposed and similarly alienating for Arab-Muslim subjects, the models of privacy and coming out are shown to be both hybridized in concrete experience and potentially emancipatory, provided we abandon the dichotomous Orientalist view and evolutionary vision of lgbt human rights history ethnocentrically focused on secularization and individualism. Indeed, informants eschew the incommensurability of the two epistemologies and the vicious circles of the homocolonialist dialectic, instead maintaining “fluid spaces” in their everyday lives.