UC Berkeley

The Great Refusal: The West, the Rest, and the Geopolitics of Homosexuality is a mixed-method, multi-scalar study comprising three chapters that investigate state regulations of sexuality. I use cross-sectional and longitudinal multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) of cross-national data from 175 countries between 1970 and the present, data that I collected and coded myself (this is the first MCA used in this dynamic, cross-temporal fashion). I supplement this global, quantitative analysis with local ethnographic and interview data collected over 18 months from the Dakar Tribunal, the largest court in Senegal, and from foreign embassies, international organizations, and local gay rights groups operating in Senegal. Chapter 1 argues that the world is sharply divided between a great embrace and a great refusal of homosexuality, a division that has grown more, not less striking over time. This division, I show, is primarily structured by the economic, political, and symbolic capital of nations, their national trajectories, as well as their racial and colonial legacies. Chapter 2 shifts down in scale, showing that the same divisions among nations paradoxically reappear within nations—and these are particularly evident in conflicts over the precedence of local claims versus international ones, which pit public-facing judges and prosecutors against international-facing ministry of justice officials. Western interventionism, I argue, further exacerbates these divisions, fueling local resentment and a backlash against the West, gay rights, and gay people. Chapter 3 dives even deeper into the work of courts and judges, but adds a comparative dimension by investigating how judicial institutions construct and punish women and men, in cases of abortion and homosexuality (or “acts against nature”). I show how judges’ opposition to both of these crimes is rooted in a logic of social and biological reproduction; I further show how judges proceed to make moral distinctions between two types of guilty offenders, redeemable and lifestyle offenders. In this chapter, another kind of empirical divide comes to the fore between how judges construct and punish women in cases of abortion on the one hand and men in cases of homosexuality on the other. Through the lens of sexuality, this work also tackles two broader global phenomena—namely, postcolonial resentment and resentment against political liberalism. Finally, I suggest that the backlash to the liberal order reveals a contradiction in liberalism itself as nations push back against liberalism’s universality by deploying liberalism’s own values of diversity, multiculturalism, and respect for cultural difference.