The Intransigence of Orientalist Desires: A Reply to Arno Schmitt

In defense of his magnum opus, Sexuality and Eroticism among Males in Moslem Societies (1992), Arno Schmitt, who coedited the book with Jehoeda Sofer and contributed three chapters ranging from twenty to four pages of text (the third chapter had a whopping eight pages), tells us in his unkind, albeit incoherent, response to my essay "Re-Orienting Desire" (2002) about the topics he covered in his twenty-page chapter. He proudly declares: "I studied the culture, mode of production, mode of reproduction, social stratification, law, ritual, medicine, and theologies of Eastern Mediterranean people over a 3,000-year period. I supplemented this with studies from other shores of the Mediterranean, from Latin America (a cultural extension of Iberia), to Iran, India (influenced by Iran), and the Malay archipelago (influenced in turn by India), as well as transmigrants."

The arrogance of this scope is staggering indeed. What justice can one hope to do to the specificities of these societies over such a geographically vast, linguistically diverse, and historically lengthy stretch in twenty or even twenty thousand pages? Only an orientalist épistémè/fantasy can hold these disparate places and times together as a coherent object of study. The kinds of literacy required to attempt this sweep are formidable and nowhere evinced by Schmitt—his poor Arabic, as demonstrated in my essay, let alone his evident lack of literacy in any of the other myriad languages spoken by Muslims (whom he studies), is the least of his limitations. Even Schmitt's maligned Foucault limited himself to Europe and never pretended to be writing empirical history or ethnography, genres and disciplines that require meticulous detail to the local and the particular. Many encyclopedic volumes would only touch the subjects of "culture, mode of production, mode of reproduction, social stratification, law, ritual, medicine, and theologies." The attempt to accomplish this in a twenty-page, poorly written, and modestly informed chapter is a travesty of scholarship, revealing, among other things, a deep contempt for the object of study.

Contrary to Schmitt's ad hominem attack on me, which is devoid of evidence, in my essay I criticized Arab as well as Western academics and activists. Indeed, I welcome anyone, Arab or not, who has done his or her homework in language and history to write about these important topics (I cited Everett Rowson as one such careful scholar, although I was critical of one of his conclusions). Some awareness on the part of a scholar of his or her genealogy of knowledge production and the politics of reception in diverse contexts, along with a commitment to the lives and sexual worlds of the subjects directly affected by the proliferation of the discourses of the Gay International, would also be welcome. But, judging from Schmitt's response, I fear I may be asking for too much.