5 - Subversive Identities

Summary

As a counterpoint, Chapter 5 considers representations of the offending men. A certain pathologised image of the Afghan man now dominates the mainstream Anglophone imaginary. This chapter analyses representations of Pashtun males in the Western media and juxtaposes them with depictions of the Afghan president Hamid Karzai in order to underscore the tensions and contradictions inherent in the hegemonic narrative of ‘Pashtun sexuality’. This chapter and the chapter on women that precedes it are best viewed as an exercise in what Richard Tapper has called ‘media ethnography’ – the ‘observation’, as it were, of information and images circulated in Britain and America by different media. The chapter also revisits the debate about homosexuality as a ‘minority identity’, arguing that the act versus identity debate is deployed in this context to simultaneously make the Pashtun Other legible and to discredit his ‘unorthodox’ ways of being. The aim of this final chapter is to show just how ‘situated’ all knowledge necessarily is, and just how insidious practices of knowledge cultivation about the Other can be. _ftnref1+G10