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Redirecting the Colonial Gaze

This piece was written as a critique of Razan Ghazzawi’s piece “Decolonising Syria's So-Called 'Queer Liberation,”[1] published on Al Jazeera following the establishment of The Queer Insurrection and Liberation Army (TQILA) under the International Revolutionary People’s Guerilla Forces (IRPGF) in Syria. In Ghazzawi’s article, she claimed that the ideology of TQILA continued the hegemonic narrative of the “War on Terror” by using imperial militarized practices to harm civilian populations, yet they would be free from criticism by Western media due to their claims to gender and sexual revolution. Sandal explains how in Ghazzawi’s own critique of the gleeful response to TQILA by Western media, she “unintentionally reproduces the colonial gaze on Kurds and the organized Kurdish struggle”. In her attempt to contest the imperialist use of queer struggles and forms of pinkwashing, Ghazzawi pushes an essentializing narrative of the Kurds in Rojava that lacks crucial nuance. Instead of centering any of the Kurdish women leading the liberation movement, Ghazzawi choose to exclude their voices and discussion of their movement more broadly. Rather, she wrote in terms of the Western agenda to defeat ISIL and the Syrian agenda of overthrowing Assad’s regime. Sandal’s engagement with Ghazzawi’s article contributes to our understanding of the complexities of narratives of decolonization and the importance of reflexivity when developing our own decolonial frameworks.

Sandal, Hakan. “Redirecting the Colonial Gaze.” openDemocracy, September 23, 2017. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/redirecting-colonial-gaze/.

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