ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Muslim homophobia to illustrate some key conceptual issues that underpin the current expansion of LGBTIQ rights internationally. It argues that there are assumptions behind the expansion of queer rights and identities that are derived from their emergence in Western societies during the modern era. Above all, there is an underlying sense that sexual politics will gradually diffuse from Western cultures to the rest of the world as the benefits of Western modernity are expanded globally. The chapter suggests, in contrast, that these assumptions produce conceptual confusions when attempting to chart the course of a globalized LGBTIQ politics. Issues around Muslim homoeroticism and Muslim homophobia illustrate that what people are dealing with in contemporary LGBTIQ politics is emphatically not the diffusion of Western outcomes of equality and routes to that particular liberation, but historically distinct circumstances that require a precise intersectional appreciation of how the sexual is being constructed in contemporary modernity.
