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69 3 Are Sexual Identities Desirable? Federico Mérida and Falah Zaggam On May 11, 2004, Federico Mérida, twenty-one, shot and killed Falah Zaggam , seventeen. According to newspaper reports, Mérida—a Mexican American from North Carolina, a husband and father, and a private in the U.S. National Guard—stood watch with Zaggam, a private in the Iraqi National Guard, on a military base near Tikrit, in northern Iraq. While on duty together, the two engaged in sexual activity, after which Mérida shot Zaggam eleven times, including one shot through the palm of his hand and one through his back. From there, accounts of what transpired that evening vary. Mérida’s own story of what happened went through three versions. First, he said that Zaggam had tried to rob him. Next, he claimed that Zaggam had tried to rape him. Finally, he said that the two had engaged in consensual sex but that Zaggam had tried to blackmail him afterward. Mérida told military investigators that, in panic, he had shot Zaggam to death and thrown his body from the guard tower. Zaggam ’s family contends that Mérida attempted to rape the younger Zaggam and killed him when he resisted. After confessing and pleading guilty to murder and perjury charges, Mérida received a twenty-five-year prison sentence and a dishonorable discharge from a military court.1 Responses to Zaggam’s murder came swiftly and varied widely. Once the story became public, the U.K.-based Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), for example, linked the case to the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison earlier that year and to several other murders of Iraqi civilians by U.S. soldiers in 2003 and 2004. The IHRC’s press release asserts that Mérida raped Zaggam before killing him.2 Meanwhile, the North Carolina–based Americans for Legal Immigration-Political Action Committee (ALI-PAC) offered, on its website, a detailed account of Zaggam’s death, but eschewed much discussion of sex in favor of another politically charged issue. It observed that Mérida originally hailed from Veracruz, 70 · Are SexuAl IDentItIeS DeSIrAble? Mexico, and implied that, despite membership in the U.S. National Guard, he may have entered the country without proper documentation. At the end of its account, the ALI-PAC website provides a link for readers who are interested in joining “the fight against illegal immigration.”3 Since first reading about this incident, I have asked myself again and again whether the framework of identity has anything useful to contribute to understanding Mérida’s actions or the numerous responses to Zaggam’s death, including my own response. For example, while it seems certain that sexual activity took place between the men, neither man appears to have ever identified publicly or privately as gay or bisexual. At first glance, theories of sexual identity do not appear to help, other than to put Mérida’s “homosexual panic” defense into a larger frame.4 Theories that understand sexuality as intermeshed with race, ethnicity, and nation, however, can help to put IHRC’s outrage into a long historical context of anticolonial responses to colonial sexual violence and to frame ALI-PAC’s linking of homosexuality to immigration within an equally long history of sexually coded xenophobia and nativism. Even so, I am left wondering about my own response—as a person whose sympathies lie mostly with the slain Zaggam (despite knowing little of him), but whose own identity would seem closer to that of Mérida: a U.S. citizen at a time of war, a Mexican American in a country where many view us as potential threats to national security, and a man who sexually desires other men in a society that disapproves of expressions of sexual desire between men. Can one live in solidarity both with Mérida, possibly a victim of his society’s homophobia and racism, and with Zaggam and his family, certainly victims of Mérida’s homophobic violence as well as his country’s jingoism and imperialism? I begin with this incident partly because the reactions it provoked and the questions it raises tug at a dense knot of beliefs, histories, and practices at the heart of what I am calling in this book the “colonial/modern gender system.” One cannot untangle this knot without a broad sense of those beliefs, histories, and practices and the ways they shape modern identities and the social movements that emerge from them...

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