The Violence of Essentialism

During the 2017 London Pride parade, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (cemb) marched with placards emblazoned with slogans such as “Islam is homophobic,” “Allah is gay,” “End Islamic Hatred and Violence to Gays”, “Islamophobia is an oxymoron” and “East London Mosque incites murder of lgbts” (Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain 2017a). The organisation is the British branch of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims, a German association representing formerMuslims or “apostates”. cemb are a self-described group of “non-believers, atheists, and ex-Muslims” committed to “taking stand for reason, universal rights, and secularism” (Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain 2017b). Deliberately provocative, the intervention was made in the name of lgbt people subjugatedby anti-homosexuality lawsby countries under “Islamic rule” andbyMuslim homophobia in the UK. More broadly, cemb’s political mobilisations are motivated by their staunch belief of the threat that Islam in particular poses to universal rights, particularly women and lgbt rights. There are obvious queer feminist criticisms to be made of cemb’s articulations of queer secularity (Khan 2020), the questionable locations of homophobia (Rao 2014), and the exceptionalisation of gendered, homophobic and sexualised violence within the amorphous “Muslim community” (El Tayeb 2013; Farris 2017; Haritaworn 2015; Puar 2017). I want to forgo this line of critique and dwell instead on the essentialisms at the heart of this mobilisation of the religion/secular divide: the politics it effects and precludes. What can the violence of essentialism— both the violence it fixates on and the violence it inflicts—reveal about the relationship between religion and gender? I suggest that investigating essentialist mobilisations of religion and gender, not as analogy nor as comparison but as relational politics, may complicate our analyses of gender, religion, and their interconnections. The following year, another spectacle unravelled at the same setting, one under a different political register but bearing kindred essentialist claims. A lesbian group,Get the LOut, carried banners stating slogans such as “transactivism erases lesbians” and protesting alleged “anti-lesbianism” (Gabbatiss 2018). The