Exceptional Sexuality in a Time of Terror: “Muslim” Subjects and Dissenting/Unmournable Bodies

Abstract

This essay complicates received understandings of violence against queer (and other) bodies in Muslim South Asia by re-visiting the 2016 killing of two Dhaka-based gay-rights activists. It challenges underlying assumptions of the relationship between violence and the secular through an examination of the different meanings assigned to secular/state violence (enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings, arbitrary detention) as opposed to religious violence (the public-execution-style murders of bloggers, gay men, and others). The essay also explores the tensions and contradictions generated within Bangladesh by the reification of gay and transgender violence. The conclusion considers the consequences of the current political climate in which some killings are unmournable and queer bodies are politically useful in selective ways.