Commodification of Ethnic Sexuality and Social Belonging - George Paul Meiu on Political Representation and the Role of Objects

In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, George Paul Meiu clarifies his concept of ethno-erotic economy and the commodification of ethnic sexuality; reflects on the role of objects in shaping political representations; discusses belonging and citizenship as well as mobility, memory, and materiality – and shares his insights concerning possible interpretations of the Greek God Dionysus episode at the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games.

Adrian Matus: You have done extensive research on East Africa, particularly Kenya. As a result, you published “Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya”[i], where you propose the concept of ethno-erotic economies to grasp what is going on in the tourist resorts of the country. Could you tell me a bit about your main findings concerning the Samburu ethnic sexuality and what they may tell us about belonging in today’s postcolonial world more generally?

George Paul Meiu: My project in ethno-erotic economy started in a very specific place in Kenya. Since the 1980s, young Samburu men from Northern Kenya have begun migrating seasonally to the coast of the Indian Ocean, where they sold souvenirs and danced for tourists, but also increasingly started developing relationships with women from Western Europe. By the time I started doing research in 2005, in Northern Kenya–where these men come from–some of the richest men in the area were in relationships with white women. For me, this raised all kinds of questions. How do you commodify ethnicity and sexuality in order to produce a certain kind of future at home? What does it mean for an indigenous population like the Samburu, who have been marginalized and peripheralized by both the colonial and independent states, to now seek a certain kind of economic emancipation by commodifying colonial stereotypes of themselves and of their sexuality?

Increasingly, what I started seeing is that this is actually very little about sexuality, as such. This is not about what people do sexually. This is about all kinds of imaginaries that one brings in terms of tourist commodification, consumption and so on. What was really interesting for me was how these things reverberate beyond tourism. I ended up going back to some of these men's villages where I did the heavy part of my research and saw how the money that they brought home gave rise to all kinds of gossip and debates over what it means to make money through sex and feed your children and parents with it. All of these moral dilemmas raise questions about what it means to belong, to belong to that area and to an ethnic group. A lot of what these young men were also doing was trying to use the capital they acquired through sexuality to gain respectability.

In many parts of the world today, people use sex economies to try to move to the West or other more affluent parts of the world. What was interesting for me here is that these young men did not. Most of them wanted to go back to their home village, where the value of the money was higher, where they had the comfort of being at home and where the ability to negotiate respectability was very different. This created all kinds of puzzles. What does it mean to be a young man in your early 20s, to already have so much money and to gain access to becoming an elder, a respected elder, through your sexuality? All these conundrums raise the issues over what it means to belong. This is a story about East Africa, about Samburu indigenous people and the colonial discourses of their sexuality. In many ways, it is closely related to the global phenomenon of intensified migration.

We see the commodification of ethnic sexuality everywhere. What I mean by ethnic sexuality is the very modernist idea that we carry within our bodies something that we can call sexuality.

On the one hand, we see across the world now a growing commodification of migrants. I am currently doing research in Romania. A lot of Romanian migrants in Western Europe– men and women–commodify their sexualities and sexual economies, as Eastern Europeans and Romanians. This fantasy has very strong repercussions. On the other hand, we see growing ethno-nationalism everywhere that plays out in the name of sexuality and ethno-sexuality. Sexuality becomes quite key in both consumption and governance in the contemporary world.

AM: In your book Queer Objects to the Rescue[ii], you shifted and narrowed the focus of your investigation by pointing to objects that play a surprising role in shaping political imageries that represent queerness as a societal threat and the resulting practices to exclude queer people. Your claim is that, if we want to understand and critique homophobia, we need to understand the role of such objects. One of your central points is that plastic plays an important role in this type of representation, as Chapter 4 of this book argues. What are the main reasons behind associating plastic with queerness?

GPM: The deployment of political homophobia has played a central role in morally legitimizing the sovereignty of the state. In many contexts, the state actually works to monopolize capital and claim monopoly on various forms of extraction and exploitation. In this very moment, it seems to me that when we talk about these things, such as moral policing and moral panics, our ability to imagine has become quite bankrupt.

When we talk about homophobia, for example, we end up demonizing homophobes versus positioning ourselves as scholarly critics; activists on a position of superiority to those irrational Others who hate. While not condoning any form of hate or relativizing it, I do think that as social scientists we have a responsibility–ethical and political–to try to understand the conditions in which hate is reproduced, also.

Thus, working on objects was not necessarily an attempt to narrow the focus, but to escape this discursive realm that keeps us trapped in a kind of liberal, emancipatory discourse versus irrational, backward, demonic hate dichotomy. We need to understand things differently. We need to step a bit outside. Objects, in a way, did that for me. The paradox of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, misogyny and hate towards migrants creates a globalized grammar of hate. If these things indeed are global, then that still does not explain how people and populations–vast populations across the world with very different contexts of life, work and governance– pick them up.

These discourses have to be made to resonate. I was trying to look at those poetics. How does a leader come in front of the masses and say: “your children are in danger immigrants, are in danger of the homosexuals?” For people to pick up, I do not believe these discourses that just assume masses are these irrational, malleable things. In reality, we have to pay close attention to the sentiments and desires that they are expressing. Therefore, for me, objects became an interesting coincidental way to tap into the production of collective sentiments. While doing previous research on my first book in Kenya, I started seeing a lot of concern and panics over various kinds of objects, and then I thought, how might panic over various kinds of objects tell us something about the panics over homosexuals or immigrants?

Just to give a quick example, early on in my research I came across a Facebook post by somebody in Northern Kenya who made a homophobic statement. The way it was formulated was quite intriguing for me as an anthropologist. It said that “homosexuality is a foreign plastic import that doesn't fit African chemistry”. There's a lot of cultural and historical baggage that goes into formulating and understanding what is being said here. For me, this resonated because I had already started working in northern Kenya on questions of plastic and panics over them.  The fact that there is a whole category of young men in the area called plastic boys, children of refugees who do not claim any belonging to clans or lineages in the area, and therefore–like plastic–seem to come from elsewhere and never attach themselves to any particular place, is significant. Plastic became a very evocative medium, object, or set of objects, that gave a certain kind of material expression to anxieties over belonging, autochthony, bodily well-being, and integrity, as well as to concerns over reproduction, whether biological or social.

In that regard, objects give us the certainty of a definitive cause for all our troubles it's because of plastic, it's because of the plastic boys, it's because of this that we cannot live our lives fully as an ethnic group, as a nation, and so on. Something very similar, in fact, happens with the homosexual body. These objects, I argue in this book, enable a certain kind of displacement of meanings, but also of sentiments, anxieties, and desires, from a very diverse set of contexts, where they often have very legitimate reason to exist, particularly where opportunities of work and social reproduction have shrunk. Yet while these anxieties are very legitimate, their projection upon objects, whether it's plastic or the homosexual or the immigrant, can be very problematic. This is, in a way, how I think contemporary politics works, and therefore we do need to pay attention to these forms of displacement.

When you have a sexuality politics that only looks at what it names; when we say we're studying sexuality or we're activists of sexuality and all we care about is sexual identification and sexual expression; we miss out on how sexuality ends up taking on anxieties, concerns and desires that have nothing to do with sex or sexual identity at all. Rather, they belong to other domains like work, reproduction and consumption sovereignty.

AM: Could you tell us about your fieldwork and how you try to make sense of the objects you encounter? What methodologies do you prefer when trying to account for the role of commodification in the routes of violence and displacement?

GPM: I think that my methodologies over the years have become messier and messier. I am doing things that I would never advise my graduate students to do because it is, in a way, messy. I do find myself more and more in need to embrace messiness in order to decentre certain discourses. A proper methodology about sexuality would be to do some participant observation such as interviews – to talk to people about sexuality.

What I'm doing is a bit different in the sense that, in order to understand what sexuality politics is about or what the commodification of sexuality is all about, you need to look elsewhere. You need to leave sexuality aside and look at the places in which its effects or, or conditions of possibility emerge. I am studying homophobia, but I am putting homophobia on hold, and I'm going and looking at what plastic signifies before I can connect it back. I call these ethnographic detours with other anthropologists who have written them in a similar vein.

These kinds of methodologies pursue ethnographic detours. In other words, rather than look straight on at the subject that we claim to observe, and only engage with the literatures pertaining to that subject or take that subject very literally, I am trying to walk in circles around that subject in order to see how its effects or conditions of possibility emerge or register beyond it. To be a scholar or an anthropologist of sexuality, I have to actually pay attention to labor and economic value. I have to pay attention to questions of ethnicity and autochthony. I have to pay attention to questions of commodity production and consumption. In other words, you have to be everywhere and nowhere.

AM: Your most recent publication On Hate, its Objects, and the Poetics of Sexuality juxtaposes the Romanian and the Kenyan cases of highly mediatization panics over sexuality. You argue that one of the reasons of defending the “family values from the foreign plight” is determined by “a late capitalist political economy when sexuality—its politics and poetics—plays out in uncannily similar ways across the world” and creates “an interplay between globally circulating grammars of identity” that are able to resonate with inherited historical anxieties. What creates the objects of hate in these cases? Could you expand on such patterns of panic?

GMP: I think I can try to distil two patterns, maybe through an example or two, to help. Because one of the key issues of this modularity of objects of hate, whether we talk about the immigrant, whether we talk about the sexual other, whether we talk about various forms of sexualized indigenous people or racialized others and so on, there is something quite similar happening across the globe.

For instance, the fact that Russia has anti-LGBTQ politics and the fact that previously Bolsonaro's Brazil had similar politics, those things resonate with one another. You cannot say that these are separate places, separate cultures –we live in a global world. We recognize the enemy, as it were, by virtue of its appearance everywhere. But what I am arguing as an anthropologist is that we cannot stop there. The work that this does in every place is really important to pay attention to. One interesting example was a few years ago when radical right protesters in Brazil, for example, protesting for family values, anti-LGBTQ policies, or against what they call “gender ideology”. Any discourse or film or culture production associated with gender and sexual diversity was depicted as somehow threatening to the fabric of a nation or a culture.

When these protesters gathered in Rio in front of a venue where queer and feminist theorist Judith Butler was to give a talk, they produced an effigy of Judith Butler dressed as a witch and set it on fire as though to cleanse, as it were, the nation state of the plight of “gender ideology”. To me, what happened there of course is scary, but if you take a deep breath and try to analyse ethnographically what is going on there, it gives you a sense of the quite complex grammars through which this sort of sexuality politics and ethno-nationalism plays out.

There is a growing sense of ambiguity and uncertainty around the center. I argue in my book Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya that you do not need to be queer for elements of your life to already have been deeply non-normativ