>>7916I figure that false equivalences like this are wheeled out to deflect criticism. While anti-woke soldiers do exist, not every critique of LGBT positions is equal to Sam Walsh level reaction.
There's an irony that Western queers are anti-normative, but when it comes to foreign sexual cultures they don't understand they are obsessed with asserting their moral superiority and imposing their own normativity onto them. LGBT is held up as a sort of end stage of queer history, the final model the whole world must evolve towards. Anything that doesn't align with it is branded reactionary or patriarchal or marginal. Why should they be dismissed as reactionary or regressive? This issue requires nuance because the critical context is omitted: the conquest of Islamic peoples by imperialism.
>The people looking for historical incarnations of themselves are missing the point though.I'm really not interested in that, which is a problem by itself. What bugs me is why do historians of sexuality in the West (e.g. Foucualt) omit colonialism? LGBT identity was invented in the West, but how this construction was shaped by the project to heterosexualize Native Americans or colonize Algeria is simply never asked. All we get are "the British spread anti-gay laws" but no real concern for how gay culture was shaped by the reality of conquest e.g. the Arab Islamic East was often portrayed as a place of barbaric sexual perversion, as a safe haven for homosexuals, as a sex tourism destination for gay men in the 70s, as a place that needed to modernize through heterosexualization.