Slavoj iek: Sexual is

Political
Both in the Islamic State and the United States of America
In the Palestinian social media, a fight is going on, which is being
ignored by the West. There are two people in the foreground:
Mohamed Asaf and Tamer Nafar. Asaf is a pop singer from Gaza, very
popular not only among the Palestinians, but in the entire Arab world
and even in some places in Europe. He is supported by Hamas in Gaza
and the Palestinian authorities; they proclaimed him the cultural
Ambassador of Palestine. With a beautiful voice he sings soft love and
patriotic songs in a pop style. Politically he is a unifying personality,
since he is above political divisions, supporting only the freedom for
Palestine. In March this year Asaf said in an interview, that in the name
of "sustaining the tradition" he won't allow his sister to sing in public.
Tamer Nafar, a Palestinian rapper, who is the main actor of Udi Aloni's
film Junction 48 and also the co-screenwriter of the film, replied to
Asaf in a touching open letter:
"If any other pop singer would have said: 'In accordance with
our tradition women can't sing in public and I personally value
this tradition, therefore I can't let my sister sing,' I would
protest and confront him, but because it's about Asaf, our
Cinderella from Gaza, I am left feeling still angry, but above all,
I'm sad.
Just like the Palestinians, who in support of Mohamed Asaf first
gathered on the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, in the
diaspora, refugee camps and inside the area, out of which they
squeezed us in the year of 1948, I also call on Asaf to join us at
these same streets to give incentive to the girl from
Yemen, Gaza, Morocco, Jordania or Lid - to the girl, which
dreams to sing, dance, write and compete on the Arab Talents.
Because we are Palestinians, we have to fight against the Israeli
apartheid and gender inequalities. I dream for us to walk with
hand in hand, for a woman to hold a man by his hand in the

fight against the walls that divide us. It's not smart to march
each by himself and simultaneously call for unity!
Do you want to talk about tradition? From personal experiences
I can tell you, that I was an angry kid from the ghetto in Lide. I
only calmed down after my mother sung to me. This is the
tradition I want to conserve! Therefore, our dear Arab sisters,
sing, as loud as you can, cross borders, so we will calm down.
Freedom for everyone or for nobody!"
Aloni's film talks about the problematic position of young Israeli
Palestinians (which are the descendants of families that after the war of
1948 stayed in Israel), whose everyday life means constant struggle on
two fronts: against the repression of the Israeli state and against the
fundamentalist pressures inside his own community - Nafar in his
songs makes ridicule of honour killings, the victims of which are
Palestinian girls, and because of this he is even attacked by the Western
supporters of the Left. Something strange happened to him in a recent
visit to the USA. When in the student campus of the University of
Columbia in New York he sang a song, in which he protests honour
killings, some anti-Zionist students attacked him for dealing with this
topic - they accused him that in this way he is only propagating the
Zionist view of Palestinians as primitive barbarians (and added, that if
honour killings actually do exist, Israel is responsible for them, since it
is because of the Israeli occupation that the Palestinians are forced to
live in poor conditions which is why their society can't modernize).
Nafar replied in a dignified way: "When you criticize me, you are
criticizing my community in English, to make a good impression on
your radical professors. When I sing in Arabic, I sing to protect the
women in my 'neighbourhood'."
He tried to say, that Palestinians don't need the condescending help of
Western Liberals; even less they need silence about honour killings
because of the "respect" of western leftists towards the Palestinian way
of life. These two aspects - the enforcing of Western values as universal
human rights and the respect towards different cultures, regardless of
the horrors which can be a part of these cultures - are two sides of the
same ideological mystification. A lot has been written about how
perverse the generalities of fundamental human rights are, how in
secret they give advantage to Western cultural values and norms (the
individual has priority before the community and so on). But to this

insight we should add that multicultural anti-colonial advocacy of the

different ways of life is also false: it hides the conflicts inside all of these
ways of life, it justifies horrible acts, sexism and racism as expressions
of a culture, of which we don't have the right to judge based on foreign,
Western values.

Toilets for everyone in the student campus in the city Rancho Bernardo in California.

The polemics between Asaf and Nafar is a part of a larger struggle,

connected to sexual difference, which gives an additional meaning to
the slogan from 1968: Sexual is political. Decades ago Ayatollah
Khomeini wrote: "We don't fear sanctions. We don't fear a military
invasion. We tremble before the invasion of Western immorality."
Khomeini's words about the fear and about what from the West a
Muslim should be most afraid of, has to be understood literally:
Muslim fundamentalists have no problem with brutal economic
competition and military clashes, their true enemy aren't the Western
economic neocolonialism and military violence, but Western "immoral"
culture. The same goes for Putin's Russia, where conservative
nationalists present the fight with the West as a cultural one, in the last
instance focused on sexual difference: when the Austrian transvestite
won Eurovision Putin himself said at a dinner in Saint Petersburg: "The
Holy Bible talks about two genders, male and female, and the main

purpose of their union is to give birth to children." As usual irinovski

was less restrained and marked the outcome of the Eurovision pop
contest as 'the end of Europe'. "Our outrage is unconstrainable. There
are no more men and women in Europe, there is only it." The minister's
deputy Dmitrij Rogozin tweeted, that Eurovision showed the
supporters of European integration the future of Europe, which are
bearded girls. In this figure of a bearded lady as the symbol of United
Europe lies a kind of quasi-poetic unnatural beauty (for a long time the
bearded lady was a part of the standard cast of freaks in cheap circuses)
- no wonder, that Russia among the calls to a new cultural Cold War
didn't want to play the Eurovision song to its television viewers. The
logic is the same as Homeini's: the fear is not aroused by either army or
economy, but by immoral degradation, the threat of sexual difference.
In many African and Asian countries even the movement for the rights
of homosexuals is understood as the expression of the cultural
influence of capitalist globalisation and it's undermining of traditional
social and cultural values, so that the fight against homosexuals looks
like an aspect of anti-colonial struggle. Doesn't the same hold for Boko
Haram? For its members the liberation of women represents the most
visible feature of the destructive cultural influence of capitalist
modernisation, so that Boko Haram (which name could be translated
approximately as 'Western education is forbidden, especially the
education of women') can understand and present itself as a force,
which fights the destructive influence of modernisation, specifically
with the enforcement of hierarchic rules for the relation between sexes.
The question is then, why Muslims, which undoubtedly experienced
exploitation, domination and other destructive and humiliating aspects
of colonisation, in their responses attack that which is (at least for us)
the best of Western heritage: our advocacy of equality and personal
freedom, with a healthy dose of irony combined with making fun out of
every authority. The answer is obvious: their goal is carefully chosen.
The Liberal West is for them not unbearable only because of
exploitation and violent domination, but also because, to add insult to
injury, because it represents the brutal reality in the guise of its
opposite: freedom, equality and democracy.
Boko Haram only took the logic of normative sexual differentiation to
the extreme. The presentation of sexual difference, which gives a
specific gender a specific role, and with this establishes a symbolic
norm, which expands itself even to urinary segregation. It's ironic, that

separate toilets are the main issue of a wild legal and ideological battle,
especially in the USA. A group of 80 directors of companies mainly
from the Silicon Valley (headed by the owner of Facebook, Mark
Zuckerberg, and the director of Apple, Thom Cook) on 29. March this
year signed a letter to the governor of North Carolina, Pat McCrory,
and in it condemned the law, which forbids the use of public toilets for
transsexuals, which are meant for the members of the other sex. "We
are disappointed because of your decision to endorse this divisive law,"
they wrote in the letter. " The majority of the business community is all
the time warning lawmakers at all levels that these kinds of laws are
bad for the employees and for business." (The law states a person has to
use public washrooms and toilets according to their biological sex, and
not the sex with which it identifies. Transsexuals would have to
officially change their sex on their birth certificate, to be able to use the
appropriate toilets.) So it is clear, what big Capital thinks: Tom Cook
can easily forget about hundreds of thousands of Foxconn's workers in
China, who in slave conditions build Apple products - his big act of
solidarity with the oppressed is a demand to do away with sexual
segregation... As usual, even in this case a big company proudly goes
hand in hand with the theory of political correctness.

Conchita Wurtz and Jean Paul Gaultier, Wienna 2015.

So what is transsexuality? It means that an individual feels a disparity

between the biological sex (female or male, which society assigns him
at birth) and the subjective identity. That's why it doesn't cover only
"men, who feel and act like women" and the other way around, but also
a very complex composition of additional sexually unusual positions,
which are outside the binary opposition between male and female:
duogender, trigender, allgender, variable gender and also nongender.
The vision of social relations that is supported by transsexuality is the
so-called postsexuality: the social, political and cultural movement, the
members of which advocate the voluntary absolvation of gender, which
is possible because of the recent advance of science in biotechnology
and reproductive technology. Their plan does not concern only
scientific possibilities, but is also ethically justified: the premise of
postsexuality presupposes, that social, emotional and cognitive
consequences of fixed gender roles is an obstacle to perfect human
emancipation. The society, where sexual reproduction would
be abolished (or in which other variations are also possible, so that for
example a woman could be the father of her own child and so on), will
give rise to unheard of new possibilities to experiment with freedom,
society and emotions. It will abolish the difference because of which all
later social hierarchies and forms of exploitation are maintained.
We could say that postsexuality is the truth of transsexuality: the
indiscriminate variability of sexual identity reaches its unavoidable
peak with the abolition of sex as such. Let's remember Marx's excellent
analysis of how in the midst of the French Revolution in 1848 the
conservative republican Party of order functioned as the coalition of
two branches of Royalists (Orleanists and Legitimists) in a "nameless
kingdom of the Republic": one can be a Royalist generally only by being
a Republican - and similarly one can be sexualized generally only by
being asexual.
The first thing to note about transsexuality is that it is connected to a
general tendency in today's prevailing ideology of the rejection of every
particular "belonging" and the celebration of the "variability" of every
identity. Thinkers just as Frederic Lordon recently emphasized the
inconsistency of "cosmopolitan" intellectuals, which oppose
nationalism and advocate "freedom from belonging" and in extremis
usually reject every search for roots in every affiliation to a particular

ethnic or cultural identity as almost protofascist. Lordon compared this

secret belonging of the self-proclaimed universalists without roots with
the oppressive reality of refugees and illegal immigrants, from which
the fundamental rights are taken and which desperately search for any
form of belonging (for example a new nationality). Lordon is
completely right in this sense: it's not hard to notice, that
"cosmopolitan" intellectual elites in their contempt towards the local
population, which sticks to its roots, belong to their own, completely
exclusive circles of elites without roots and that their cosmopolitan lack
of roots is itself a sign of a deep and strong belonging. This is exactly
why it is extremely indecent to connect elite "nomads", who travel the
world, and refugees, which desperately search for a safe place, towards
which they would feel they belong - it is the same indecency as if we
would compare a rich Western woman on a diet and a starving refugee.
Furthermore we here stumble upon an old contradiction: the more
somebody is on the edge and excluded, the more he is allowed to
express his ethnic identity and a specific way of life. This is the
politically correct thinking: people far away from the Western world
can in entirety express their special ethnic identity, without being
proclaimed as essentialist rasist identitarians (the natives of America,
blacks...); the more we come close to the infamous white heterosexual
males, the more objectionable this claim becomes: Asians are OK,
maybe also Italians and Irish, but with Germans and Scandinavians it's
already objectionable.... But this kind of prohibition of the expression
of the identity of white people (as a model of the oppression of others),
even though it might seem like an admission of guilt, nonetheless
reflects a fundamental opinion, that because of this prohibition of the
expression of identity they become the general neutral middle, the
starting point, from which the truth about the other's oppression is
accessible. The imbalance influences also in the opposite direction: the
impoverished European countries expect that the developed Western
European countries will take over the entire burden of multicultural
openness, while they themselves could treat themselves with
patriotism.
The same tension can also be detected in transsexuality: transsexual
people, who seem transagressive, are resisting every prohibition and
can simultaneously act hypersensible, they feel oppressed because of a
forced choice ("Why should I have to decide if I'm a man or a woman?")

and they need a space, where they could wholly recognize themselves.
If they so proudly insist on their 'trans-' beyond every classification,
why do they at the same time so steadily insist on their own proper
space? Why do they not react to separate toilets with heroic
indifference - "I am a transsexual, a little of this, and a little of that,
dressed as a woman and so on, therefore I can choose whichever door I
will enter?" Don't "ordinary" heterosexuals have similar problems,
since they themselves sometimes can't recognize themselves in the
prescribed sexual identity? We could even say, that being a man (or a
woman) doesn't mean an identity, but is more of a way of avoiding a
specific identity... And we can easily predict that new anti-differential
demands will arise: why not a marriage between more than two people?
What justifies the limitation to a binary form of marriage? Why not
even marriage with animals - isn't it now, when we know the details of
animal emotions, the exclusion of the possibility to marry an animal is
an undoubtable case of species differentiation, an unjust privileging of
the human species?
There is only one way out of this blind valley, and it is the same we have
with garbage disposal,- these are trash cans. Public trash cans are today
more and more differentiated: we have special cans for paper, glass,
metal cans, carton, plastic, and so on. Even there sometimes
complications arise: If I have to throw out a waxed paper bag or a
notebook with plastic binding, where should I throw it, into paper or
packaging? No wonder, that there are on the trash cans along with the
general sings also detailed instructions: PAPER: books, newspapers
and so on, but NOT books with hard covers or in plastic wrapping and
so on. In these cases the proper disposal of trash could take up to half
of an hour or more, to read all of the instructions and to properly
decide. To make it simpler we also have a trash can for other garbage,
where we put everything, which doesn't fit what is listed on the other
trash cans - again we have along with special trash cans for paper,
plastic and so on also a trash can as such, a general trash can. Shouldn't
we also do the same with toilets? Because no division can satisfy all of
the identities, we would put along with the two (three...) established
entrances an additional door for a "general gender".
he reason for the inefficiency of all of these classifications, which try to
be as detailed as possible, is not the empirical richness of identities,
which resist classification, but exactly the opposite, the insistence that

the differences between sexes are real, "impossible" (because they resist
classification) and at the same time unavoidable. The multiplicity of
gender aspects (male, female, homosexual, duosexual, transsexual and
so on) circles around an antagonism which forever eludes it.
Homosexuals are male, lesbians are women, transsexuals establish a
passage from one to the other, to dress into the member of the other
sex is a combination of both, duosexuality floats between them... every
way we turn it, there is a duality somewhere.
That's why it's important to emphasize the opposition that appears
today: on the one hand the violent imposition of a solid symbolic form
of sexual differentiation as the key move against the social
disintegration, on the other hand a perfect transsexual transition of
genders, the dispersion of sexual differences into a multiplicity of
forms. On one part of the world abortion and marriage between
homosexuals are supported as a clear sign of moral progress, elsewhere
inflamed homophobic campaigns and protests against abortion appear.
The big mistake when dealing with this opposition is to search for the
proper balance between the extremes - instead of this we should
emphasize what is the same in both extremes: a peaceful world in
which the agonistic tension of sexual differentiation vanishes, be it
either in a clear and solid hierarchic division of sexes or in a joyful
variability of the desexualized universe. It is not hard to discern in this
dreaming of a peaceful world of a society without social antagonisms,
or to put it in other words, without class struggle.

Text published in the Slovene journal Mladina 16 on 22. April 2016, translated from
Slovene to English and published without authorization by Simon Gros on 23. April
2016.