Originally published here.
Abdul was 28 years old when we interviewed him; he left Morocco 10 years ago.As a result of the migration process, he discovered a different way of experiencing sexwith other men, which changed his way of experiencing desire. He lives in a small townin Catalonia with his brother and uncles. He goes to demonstrations for LGBT rights inBarcelona. He leaves his brother “clues” so he knows he likes men, but he does not want tospeak to him directly about it.Karim was also born in Morocco and arrived in Catalonia when he was 14.
He lives ina medium-sized city with his parents, with whom he maintains a delicate balance regardinghis homosexuality. It is tolerated as long as it is not verbalised; a couple of years ago, itbecame evident that he had a relationship with a man, they took him to his country oforigin to try to “cure him”. Since then, he has remained silent about his sexuality aroundhis parents while he links up with associations for LGBT rights in his city and Morocco and,when he is with a man, he expresses his affection in public.
Laila is 26 when we interviewed her. When she was nine, she left Algeria to go toa foster family in a small town in Catalonia. Although she likes women, she refuses to usethe label ‘lesbian,’ as she believes it gives away very private personal information. In recentyears, the pressure from her biological family for her to marry a Muslim man has increasedto the point that she does not want to visit her country of origin in case she is retained there.
She suffers a lot trying to manage the tension between distancing herself and the need topreserve the bond with her biological family.In this article, based on these and other experiences, we ask: Are the professionalsof LGBTQ support services aware of the specificities that people from minority culturaland religious backgrounds can have in relation, for example, to the public dimension of sexuality, or the family and community bonds? Are the people who work in the supportservices for migrants or asylum seekers equipped with the tools to assist people with non-normative sexualities or genders? Do educational programmes to prevent LGTBphobia andpromote an inclusive understanding of sex education consider the cultural and religiousdiversity present in the classroom? Do LGBT policies incorporate the intersection withcultural and religious diversity?
Is the ethnocentrism of sexual and religious diversityquestioned, as well as the cisheterosexism of intercultural policies?The general aim is broken down into two specific objectives. The first clear objectiveis, based on interviews, to understand the experiences of queer migrants from the Maghrebliving in Catalonia. The second objective is to analyse how LGBT and intercultural poli-cies consider how these two axes intersect, based on interviews with people working inthese fields.
This article focuses on the case of Catalonia (Spain) where, since the implementationof law 11/2014 for the rights of LGBT people in 2014, it is compulsory for municipalitieswith more than 20,000 inhabitants to develop an LGBT policy programme and to createa service to assist victims of LGBTphobia. Although this has meant an enormous boostfor LGBT equality policies, some limitations are relevant for the issues addressed in thispaper: they have not been designed from an intersectional perspective. More specifically,they have been carried out without any connection with policies dealing with policies withcultural diversity. In the specific case of educational programmes to tackle LGBTphobia,we must take into account that sex education does not have a specific place in the Spanishschool curriculum, its contents have not been as thorough as would have been desirable(Martínez et al. 2012), and there is also a lack of appropriate teacher training in sex education (Martínez et al. 2013).
As a result, Spanish adolescents of both genders tend to bemisinformed about sexuality, and myths and misinformation regarding sexuality seem tobe common at this stage (Fernández-Rouco et al. 2019). However, these previous studiesdo not tackle LGBT equality issues or adopt an intersectional perspective to analyse thecontent and the impact of sex education in Catalonia or Spain.Regarding public policies on cultural diversity, they do not have much history, partiallydue to the fairly recent arrival of migrants from the Global South to Catalonia.
Maghreb mi-grants (especially Moroccan) are the largest group in Spain, with Catalonia being the Span-ish autonomous region with the highest number of Moroccan residents (INE 2020), compris-ing 18.8% of the total foreign population (IDESCAT 2020). The Maghreb living in Cataloniaare increasingly more visible in the realm of civil society(Østergaard-Nielsen 2009). Ac-tually, the recent boost of both areas of public policies and the fact that they are not fullyinstitutionalised may constitute an opportunity to question their unitary approach and toembrace intersectionality (Cruells and Coll-Planas 2013).
This article aims to analyse the articulation between the experiences of queer migrantsfrom the Maghreb living in Catalonia and the LGBT and intercultural policies. This aimwill allow us to critically reflect on the biases in sexual and gender diversity policiesin relation to the axis of cultural and religious diversity. This aspect has not yet beenaddressed in Catalan and Spanish research, unlike other Global North countries witha longer trajectory in contemporary migration, such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, andFrance (seeColl-Planas et al. 2020).
Analysing this articulation in the Catalan context isrelevant because of the shorter contemporary trajectory as a migrant-receiving society andof the spread and institutionalisation of LGBT policies.The terminological aspects are relevant in a study that precisely seeks to question theWestern logic in the construction of (homo)sexuality. However, it is impossible to find ter-minology that enables us to fully escape from the ethnocentric perspective. After reviewingthe different options used in the studies examining this subject(Coll-Planas et al. 2020), wehave chosen ‘queer’ to refer to the sexuality of our informants because this category, despitealso originating in the West, allows us to address forms of sexuality that go beyond norma-tivity and that to a great extent cannot be categorised (Sáez 2004).
In Rahman’s (2010, p. 946)words: a “queer focus on unstable ontologies can be a relevant way to theorize this intersectionality because the lived experiences or standpoint of gay Muslims illuminatestheir identities as always ontologically deferred from the dominant identity categories of‘gay’ and ‘Muslim’”. Thus, in this article, we use ‘queer ’ as a stance that breaks with theestablished rules regarding aspects such as gender, sexuality, cultural identity, and faith.
The assimilationist approach considers that the way sexual and gender diversityis managed in the West is superior to elsewhere, arguing this from a universalist andevolutionist logic according to which LGBT people from non-hegemonic cultures andreligions (and especially of the Arab culture and Muslim religion) have to abandon theirorigins and embrace the “liberating” Western logic. In this line, it is considered that the statehas to play the role of helping this social group to eliminate the conservative influences oftheir origins and incorporate the modern, egalitarian and democratic elements associatedwith the West. However, when we analyse the experiences of queer people from migrantbackgrounds whom we interviewed, we see that assimilation is a mirage: in real life, it isnot possible to erase the cultural baggage or the links that connect us to the family andcommunity of origin.
Thus, we find that the logic of hybridity is key in the narratives of the queer peoplefrom a Muslim background whom we interviewed. The informants do not have any optionother than to build their own path combining elements from both cultures. Therefore,from our point of view, hybridity would not be an option but the only alternative tothe impossibility of completely continuing the parameters of the culture of origin andthe host culture. Hybridity that does not become idealisation, as has been criticised byAhmad (1995)and Dirlik (1997), becomes an ambivalent path: open to creativity and thequest for one’s answers, but also plagued with tensions.
Applied to policies, hybridity takesthe form of questioning the ethnocentrism of LGBT policies; considering the intersectionwith the axis of cultural and religious diversity to better accompany LGBT people fromminority cultures and religions; and ensuring that the respect of sexual and gender diversitydoes not contribute to the construction of the immigrant person, especially Muslims, asthe Other.Focusing on the dimension of Policies, the focal point of this article, we want tounderscore two axes of tension that have emerged and which we would like to furtherexplore in future articles.
The first axis is related to the construction of the figure of themigrant queer person from a Muslim background. In the interviews with people workingin LGBT and cultural and diversity policies, we have found a tension in this regard. On theone hand, there are informants who, often from an assimilationist perspective, generalisewhen constructing the figure of the Muslim immigrant to such an extent that they denythem the capacity of agency and the different ways of embodying and experiencing thisposition.
On the one hand, they are approaching what Sara Ahmed (Ahmed 2000, p. 5) callsthe ‘stranger fetishism’, which “invests the figure of the stranger with a life of its own insofaras it cuts ‘the stranger’ off from the histories of its determination”, that is, denying theirnature as subjects and using this category “to establish and define the boundaries of who‘we’ are” (Ahmed 2000, p. 3). At the other end of this axis, we find the people who avoidgeneralisation by presenting Muslim migrants as unique people among whom no commontraits can be identified. This trend is more present in the hybridity discourse.
Regardingthis tension, the challenge would be to recognise potential cultural and socioeconomicdifferences stemming from the migratory process, without denying the subjects’ agency orthe individual variability.Secondly, we identify a second tension related to how the role of the State is constructedin this matter. On the one hand, assimilationist stances suggest that the state must treateveryone as equal, that all citizens should receive the same information and training (aboutsexual and gender diversity, in this case) without differentiating between religious originsor beliefs.
On the other hand, more present in hybridity discourses, there is an effort toadapt the interventions to take cultural and religious diversity into account. Thus, as thefirst extreme runs the risk of falling into universalism and ethnocentrism, the second runsthe risk of falling into culturalism and cultural relativism.In this regard, Jacqueline Bhabha (Bhabha 1999, p. 189) warns of the risk that in orderto move away from “the Western universalist conception of human rights”, we must not fallinto relativist conceptions that “easily become vehicles for a discriminatory hierarchisationof human rights protection and an uncritical reinforcement of exclusionary state practices”.
Thus, the challenge in relation to this tension would be how to question the ethnocentrism ofthe interventions in the area of LGBT and how to adapt them to a culturally and religiouslydiverse context without eliciting culturalist and hierarchical explanations
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