ABSTRACT
The chapter draws on narratives of South Asian Muslim American gay men of Pakistani descent in Houston to explore discourses and practices that shape transnational same-sex sexual cultures in the West. The analysis is guided by the following set of inter-related questions: What are the national, transnational and cultural contexts, discourses and social locations that shape constructions of selfhood, identity, community and belonging for gay Muslim Americans? How and to what effect do these transnational same-sex sexual cultural formations challenge and/or appropriate western terminologies and categories of sexuality in the United States, on one hand, and South Asian cultural scripts of homo-sociality and same-sex eroticism, on the other? And, finally, how is religion implicated in and intertwined with such appropriations and border crossings? The analysis disavows liberalist notions of a transparent and monolithic queer sexuality that have guided Western human rights activism in the non-West and instead employs cultural analysis to explore everyday negotiations of religion, race, sexuality and transnationalism in Muslim American communities during the early twenty-first century.
