As scholars of gender and sexuality know well, homonationalism has grown central to our time. Coined by Jasbir Puar (Reference Puar2007), the term describes the strategic deployment of so-called gay rights in opposition to the “cultural particularity” of Muslims and racialized Others. A signifier of liberal tolerance cloaked in white respectability, homonationalism emerged as the conceptual steward of Western imperialism in the context of the global war on terror. Indeed, we need look no further than the relatively recent upswell in LGB(TQ+?) inclusion on commemorative coins and stamps, in Team Canada branding at international sporting events, and in Canada's own citizenship guide, for instance, to see examples of homonationalism at work in our own backyard.
Though oddly unconcerned with homonationalism—as with other Canadian particularities—Aret Karademir's Queering Multiculturalism focuses on questions of gender, sexuality and ethno-cultural pluralism in liberal-democratic states. Following Will Kymlicka, he begins his introduction by observing that “modern societies are characterized by ethno-cultural diversity” (xi) before sketching how proponents of various liberalisms have responded to this fact. The following four chapters revisit the thought of John Rawls, Michael Walzer, Will Kymlicka, Joseph Raz, Avishai Margalit, Yael Tamir and David Miller, setting the stage for the development of what Karademir calls an “emancipationist model” of minority rights—a framework focused on cultural dialogue that takes the freedom to choose and revise one's choices as its starting point (146).
Before developing this model, however, Karademir returns us to a well-rehearsed debate: whereas orthodox liberals seek justice bereft of concern for the arguably parochial attachments of ethno-cultural minorities, supporters of liberal multiculturalism stress group-differentiated rights, asserting culture as the contextual category through which individual choices acquire meaning. But in their insistence on such rights as safeguards for minority cultures, backers of liberal multiculturalism are insufficiently attentive to cultural heterogeneity, remaining largely unable to avoid disadvantaging unorthodox internal minorities living within such groups. The problem, then, of internal minorities—one of secondary marginalization, in Cathy Cohen's (Reference Cohen1997) terms—raises a whole host of issues for liberals and non-liberals alike. Remedying these issues by rendering the non-liberal theories of Judith Butler and Martin Heidegger conversant with Kymlicka's liberal multiculturalism is Karademir's main objective in this monograph.
One of the book's strengths derives from its author's willingness to address an elephant in the proverbial room of political theory. Indeed, though liberal-feminist scholars concerned with gender and culture have shed some light on women's experiences with patriarchy, their analyses have remained mostly binary. As Karademir rightly points out, “even when (ethnic) multiculturalism is questioned regarding its capacity to accommodate the needs and concerns of minorities-within-minorities, such questioning has almost exclusively focused on women in patriarchal communities, disregarding the specific ways in which ethno-cultural minority rights might disadvantage ethnic gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people” (xvi). What emerges from these observations is a carefully argued work of liberal social ontology that seeks to understand how multiculturalism might distribute group-specific rights to ethno-cultural minorities without simultaneously endangering the freedoms of their non-normative (sexual) internal minority members.
To help develop said understanding, chapter 5 reads Butler and Kymlicka side by side. It argues that while choice and identity are equally contextual for both thinkers, only Butler conceives of one's context of choice as bounded by the unintelligible (129–36). Karademir is successful in showing how Butler's account of identity as formed through processes of citation, abjection and interpellation exposes the precise limits of Kymlicka's “societal culture” as distinct, discrete and complete (142–48). But for Karademir, neither Butler's project of troubling norms nor Kymlicka's project of affirming rights is adequate to the task of securing the freedoms of ethno-sexual internal minorities, who are too often unable to carve out safe spaces within the heterosexual matrix of their particular cultural community. For as Karademir puts it, in an amusingly Kantian tongue, “the denaturalization of norms without rights is empty, rights without such denaturalization are blind” (149). Whatever your view of liberalism or the present state of minority rights, this remains a difficult claim to deny (Brown, Reference Brown2000).
Karademir's sixth chapter proceeds with added care, expanding Kymlicka's conception of freedom by reading Heidegger from a liberal perspective (156). Drawing on some of Heidegger's core concepts, including anxiety, authenticity and, of course, Dasein, he subverts the German's philosophy, claiming that the visibility of non-normative minorities functions to decalcify the social norms held up by their majority counterparts. Accordingly, Karademir reasons that internal minorities can only become legitimate interlocutors, in both their cultural communities and society at large, following the establishment of an “authentic society,” in Heidegger's terms (168–73).
A significant contribution to multiculturalism literature, Karademir's book provides an opportunity to think beyond the gender binary from within liberal thought. Yet, absent any attention to homonationalism, his argument risks eliding still-urgent consideration of race and class in discussions of multiculturalism. An added difficulty results from the fact that queer is neither historicized nor defined in the text. Had he begun, for example, by contextualizing the difficulties faced by so-called ethno-sexual internal minorities, based on the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and other non-normative groups, he may have been better equipped to address some of the more practical questions and criticisms that are inevitably raised by his project (Carens, Reference Carens2004). Still, despite these omissions, Queering Multiculturalism remains a worthwhile read. This is a helpful contribution to liberal debates about diversity, unity and minority rights, in which racialized LGBTQ+ people are too often ignored.
