Abstract
Images of young British Muslim men engaging in terrorist activity or gang warfare proliferate in contemporary media. Such distortions frame Muslim males as a homogeneous and threatening presence within Britain; men who, despite living in the UK, are prone to a pathological form of masculinity supposedly inculcated by their religio-cultural background. In Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir K. Puar develops the framework of “homonationalism” to examine the relationship between hostilities towards Muslims and growing acceptance of LGBT subjectivities in Euro-America. Puar argues that popular discourses stereotype diverse ethno-cultural groups under a distinct racialized, religiously-defined “Muslim” grouping. These Muslim “others”, recognized through racial and sartorial profiling, are assigned viewpoints that place them in opposition to the purportedly “enlightened” West. Puar shows how this dualism has been continually reproduced in cultural production, propagating the view that to be Muslim is to be axiomatically homophobic. This article assesses the extent to which homonationalism is replicated in the British film My Brother the Devil (dir. Sally El Hosaini, 2012). Set on a housing estate in Hackney, it depicts two London-born brothers of Egyptian heritage, Rash and Mo, as elder brother Rash leaves his “gangster” lifestyle after falling in love with photographer Sayid. My Brother the Devil invokes moral panics about young British Muslim men, as well as the increased visibility of homosexuality in recent UK media and cultural output, to probe connections between masculinity, sexuality, race, and class. However, this article posits that My Brother the Devil inadvertently upholds homonationalist binaries. By analysing the film, this paper contends that what Puar terms a “Muslim or gay binary” should be considered in a British context to address how certain “liberal” Muslim subjectivities are incorporated within imaginings of Britishness, at the exclusion of Muslim subjectivities that do not fit these prescriptions.
Images of young British Muslim men engaging in terrorist activity, drug dealing, or gang warfare proliferate in contemporary media. 1 Such distortions frame Muslim males as a homogeneous and threatening presence within Britain: men who, despite living in the UK, are prone to a pathological form of masculinity supposedly inculcated by their religio-cultural background. These abstractions are fuelled by sensationalist reportage of events and controversies involving British Muslims, including the protests over Salman Rushdie’s alleged attack on Islam in The Satanic Verses (1988), the London bombings by a group of Yorkshire-born-and-bred Muslim men on 7 July 2005, and incidents of some Muslim men conspiring to sexually abuse young women. More recently, cases of extremist young Muslims leaving the UK to join the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq in 2014 and 2015 have further abetted negative stereotyping. Moreover, the extension of such stereotyping to the treatment of gender and sexual minorities has been the object of recent critical attention (Ahmed, 2011; Haritaworn et al., 2008). In her seminal monograph, Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir K. Puar (2007) develops the framework of “homonationalism” to examine the relationality between increasing hostilities towards Muslims and the growing acceptance of some lesbian, gay, and queer subjectivities in Western Europe and North America. 2 In an analysis that focuses on a US context, Puar argues that in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by the Islamist terrorist organization al-Qaeda, popular and state discourses have demonized and stereotyped diverse ethno-cultural groups under a distinct racialized, religiously-defined “Muslim” grouping. These Muslim “others”, recognized through racial and sartorial profiling, have been assigned anti-gay and misogynist viewpoints that place them in opposition to the purportedly “liberal” and “enlightened” West. Puar shows how this destructive dualism has been continually reproduced in LGBT rights discourses and queer cultural and media production, propagating the view that to be Muslim is to be axiomatically homophobic. More than other religions and religious subjects, then, “Islam” and “Muslims” are singularized as failing to respect human rights, particularly those associated with gender and sexuality. This leads to what Puar calls a “Muslim or gay binary” (2007: 15), in which the homosexual “other” is portrayed as normatively white, while the Muslim “other” is most often regarded as heterosexual and irrefutably homophobic.
Whilst Puar does not assume a direct connection between public animosity towards Muslims and growing public acceptance of gay and lesbian people, she still notes that recent reformulations in discourses of race, religion, gender, and sexuality may have surreptitious political value. As Puar describes, the “homonationalist” paradigm has substantial geopolitical import as it allows Western European and North American nations to present themselves as exceptionally tolerant with regards to gender and sexual rights. Such a viewpoint, she argues, offers legitimacy for “Western” countries to rationalize restrictions on Muslim migrants on the grounds of perceived anti-gay views, and justify military operations in the Muslim world as a means of “liberating” persecuted homosexuals and queers (2007: 3–7).
This article examines the extent to which homonationalist discourse is replicated in the British film My Brother the Devil (dir. Sally El Hosaini, 2012). Set on a housing estate in the East London borough of Hackney, My Brother the Devil traces the tensions between two British-born brothers of Egyptian heritage, Rash (played by James Floyd) and Mo (played by Fady Elsayed), as elder brother Rash leaves his “gangster” lifestyle after falling in love with the French Moroccan photographer Sayid (played by Saïd Taghmaoui). This article will assess the extent to which My Brother the Devil draws on contemporary moral panics that link young British Muslim men to urban crime, gangs, and terrorism to probe connections between masculinity, sexuality, race, and class. Despite the film’s accomplished exploration of economic and structural inequalities that affect the gang, as well as its laudable inclusion of a homosexual Muslim character of faith, this article will posit that My Brother the Devil still falls back on homonationalist binaries. By analysing the film, the article contends that what Puar refers to as a “Muslim or gay binary” (2007: 15) should be considered in a British context to examine how certain “liberal” Muslim subjectivities are incorporated within imaginings of Britishness, at the exclusion of Muslim subjectivities that do not fit these prescriptions. Before beginning my reading of My Brother the Devil, I offer a brief contextual discussion of homonationalist discourse in contemporary Britain in order to illuminate the background to the film’s production.
Whilst many scholars (for example Morey and Yaqin, 2011; Poole, 2002) argue that the Rushdie affair of 1988–89 was the starting point in the widespread circulation of negative depictions of British Muslim men, the events of September 11 have had a more demonstrable effect on both British and international perceptions of Muslims. As journalists, politicians, and academic commentators across the political spectrum have voiced, 9/11 marks a point of rupture from which the world has changed inexorably. Most controversial amongst these voices has been the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington (2002), who alleged that 9/11 was symptomatic of a “clash of two civilizations” — the so-called Muslim Orient and the secular West. 3 In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and abetted by the 7/7 bombings in London, a vast corpus of popular media has reinforced perceptions of intractable difference between the “Muslim” and the “Western” worlds, and fed a contagious paranoia about Muslims living within Britain. These include television documentaries that purportedly sought to depict the “reality behind the threat” from Britain’s Muslim population. One example is Generation Jihad (2010), which took to London council estates, like the one depicted in My Brother the Devil, to investigate the “terrorist threat” from young British Muslim men. Another pertinent example is a 2014 edition of the British Broadcasting Cooperation’s (BBC’s) Panorama documentary series entitled From Jail to Jihad?, which examined Islamic radicalization in British prisons.
Cultural narratives have not been exempt from reproducing this century’s climate of Islamophobia. A number of literary and film critics (Gunning, 2010; Matthes, 2011; Morey and Yaqin, 2011) have penned astute analyses of how cultural production has recirculated anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic discourses. Morey and Yaqin (2011), for instance, identify a series of recurring images in literary, filmic, and television narratives that work as metonymic devices to malign and essentialize diverse Muslim cultures and communities. One such figure is that of “Islamic Rage Boy”, who Morey and Yaqin define as the “mad, marauding Muslim man” whose “unkempt, ranting visage has been fetishized as an icon of pathological anti-Western fanaticism while the potentially rational and political portent of his words has passed without comment” (2011: 23). The accumulative effect of these pervasive representations has been to fuel a common viewpoint that Muslims are “a fifth column within Britain” (2011: 57).
For gay, lesbian, and queer Britons, however, recent political trajectories have led to an increase in more positive representation (Clements and Field, 2014). In recent years, the cultural visibility of homosexual and queer Britons has increased exponentially, with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer characters now populating television programmes more frequently than before, and the mainstream press often covering gay and lesbian stories in a positive light (Clements and Field, 2014). Puar (2007) argues that, in the US, 9/11 marks a watershed moment for LGBT mainstream and cultural representation as lesbians, gays, and queers were strategically embraced by the nation at a time of increased fear of “Islamic fundamentalism” and “terrorism” from a racialized “other”. Puar writes:
even as patriotism immediately after September 11 was inextricably tied to a reinvigoration of heterosexual norms for Americans, progressive sexuality was championed as a hallmark of U.S. modernity. For despite this retrenchment of heteronormativity, the United States was also portrayed as “feminist” in relation to the Taliban’s treatment of Afghani women (a concern that had been previously of no interest to U.S. foreign policy) and gay-safe in comparison to the Middle East. (2007: 41)
Drawing on Lisa Duggan’s (2002) writing on homonormativity, which refers to the absorption of heteronormative ideals and constructs into homosexual culture and identities, Puar argues that the post-9/11 era heralded a shift whereby the heteronormative ideologies that underpin the American nation-state were “now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate the narrow racial, class, gender and national ideals” (2007: xxv). To this end, normatively white, middle-class lesbians, gay men, and queers have been incorporated within imaginings of the nation due to their potential as economic contributors, consumers, and reproducers through the legalization of same-sex marriage and reproductive kinship. Homonationalist discourses, then, distinguish homonormative gay, lesbian, and queer identities as admitted within the body politic from “a perversely sexualized and racialized Muslim population […] who refuse to assimilate” (Puar, 2007: 20). Thus, the accelerant narrative of progress for some LGBT subjectivities is contradicted by the internal suppression and increased profiling and surveillance of non-white and immigrant communities associated with illiberal viewpoints and terrorism. Such ideological formulations preclude, for example, someone identifying as both Muslim and queer at the same time.
Paralleling this position, British military incursion in Iraq and Afghanistan was accompanied by heightened media interest in the experiences of queer Muslims that sought to confirm stereotypes of “Muslim homophobia” (Haritaworn et al., 2008: 12–13). LGBT Muslim organizations in Britain such as Imaan and the Safra Project received multiple interview requests from both the queer and mainstream press (Haritaworn et al., 2008: 13). Tamsila Tauqir, the co-founder of the Safra Project support group for Muslim lesbians, bisexual women, and trans people, explains that accounts of supportive Muslim parents or Imams conducting same-sex marriage contracts (nikah) were ignored in favour of stories that focused on negative experiences (Haritaworn et al., 2008: 14). Such media reports, therefore, worked to corroborate the widely disseminated view that to identify as Muslim was to hold intolerant views towards nonconformist gender and sexuality.
Consonant with an assertion by Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984) that gender and sexuality rights within Orientalized societies are embraced by Euro-America only at specific historical moments, Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir, and Esra Erdem suggest that the British media’s concentration on homophobia in Muslim communities has “more to do with developments in their own [British] culture than with the ‘Other’” (2008: 17). Sara Ahmed (2011), Haritaworn et al. (2008), and Puar (2007) all note how the “construct of ‘Muslim homophobia’ confers value to ‘Western’ identities. It also confers political capital to some ‘Westerners’ who have traditionally been excluded from it”, namely white women and homosexuals (Haritaworn et al., 2008: 18). Ahmed, for example, castigates Britain’s foremost lesbian and gay rights activist Peter Tatchell for his repetitive use of comments that create “problematic proximities” (2011: 127) between Islam, violence, and homophobia. Specifically, Tatchell couples the Islamic faith with fascist ideology by coining the phrase “Islamo-Fascism”, and slanders the entirety of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) by stating that it is “barely distinguishable” from the right-wing extremist British National Party (Ahmed, 2011: 127). As Haritaworn et al. state, Tatchell’s discrediting of the MCB also “rhetorically equates the subjects and objects of racism by constructing white gays as the most oppressed group” (2008: 19). Just as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak observes an Orientalist paradigm in which “white men are saving brown women from brown men” (2006/1988: 33), then, Ahmed (2011: 122), Haritaworn et. al. (2008: 18–19) and Puar (2007: 18–20) have criticized figures like Tatchell as signifying an emergent pattern of white gay men, lesbians and queers speaking on behalf of non-white gays, lesbians and queers.
The perceived mutually exclusive nature of “Muslim” and “gay” identities has also been reinforced through a variety of media. Television documentaries such as Channel 4’s Gay Muslims (2006) enforced perceptions of liberal Britain’s “gay friendly” status in contradistinction to the allegedly rampant homophobia of the UK’s Muslim communities. A plotline in the popular soap opera EastEnders also corroborated such stereotyping. In EastEnders (2009), the gay character Syed Masood (played by Marc Elliott) finds happiness when he pursues a relationship with a white British man but at the cost of rejection from his family. Particularly pertinent to this article is the media outpouring following cases of young Muslim men in areas of East London forming “vigilante” style gangs called “shariah patrols” during the latter half of 2013, that targeted prostitutes, women whom they judged as immoderately dressed, and homosexuals for harassment. Occurring in housing estates much like the setting of My Brother the Devil, these incidents bolstered impressions that Muslim-majority neighbourhoods in East London are “no go areas for gay men and women”. 4 Articles published across the right-wing, conservative, and liberal tabloid press used these controversies to buttress perceptions of an exceptional Muslim homophobia.
Whilst this article does not mean to mitigate these cases of homophobic abuse, or to discount the homophobia and familial exclusion faced by many LGBT and queer people of Muslim heritage, it does dispute perceptions that this is a universal experience for Muslim queers and criticizes ways in which some cultural narratives echo these assumptions. My Brother the Devil is one such example, in which a binary is employed between the prosperous, liberal, homosexual character of Sayid, whose appearance and lifestyle closely resemble homonormative scripts, and the gang who are portrayed as the homophobic “other”.
Upon its release, many reviewers commented that My Brother the Devil combined contemporary concerns about British Muslim men with sympathetic representations of homosexuality into a narrative and aesthetic that shared the “ghettocentric imagination” (Berghahn, 2013: 212) of the African American “hood film”, such as John Singleton’s (1991) Boyz n the Hood. 5 Taking her cue from Ed Guerrero’s (1993) work on African American cinema, Daniela Berghahn uses the term ghettocentric to describe a body of film-making that foregrounds “juvenile delinquency, the fatal consequences of guns, drugs, black-on-black violence and dysfunctional black families” combined with “rap music and the aesthetics of hip hop” (2013: 122). Films such as Kidulthood (dir. Menhaj Huda, 2006), La Haine (dir. Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995), Short, Sharp, Shock (dir. Fatih Akın, 1998), and Bullet Boy (dir. Saul Dibb, 2004) utilize these motifs to examine socioeconomic deprivation, hyper-masculine gender constructions, and gang violence amongst the multiethnic communities encased in the urban peripheries of many European cities. My Brother the Devil shares a thematic background, geographic setting, and stylistic approach with the aforementioned films.
The film takes place in a run-down East London housing estate, which serves as a “site of social struggle and […] an emblematic space of marginality” (Higbee, qtd. in Berghahn, 2013: 122) in which “young, disenfranchised men form gangs, roam the streets, playgrounds and stairways” of the apartment blocks (Berghahn, 2013: 122). The central characters in My Brother the Devil, Rash and Mo, are brothers whose parents are confined to domestic spaces within Hackney, where they recreate their Egyptian heritage by speaking Arabic and cooking Egyptian cuisine. The young men’s father works long shifts as a bus driver for which he receives modest earnings and urges his sons to follow suit, bemoaning Rash’s resistance to seek work at the job centre. Within the sons’ logic, their father embodies their sense of marginalization and emasculation as his field of employment is one that is historically associated with immigrant communities and results in a humble salary. Therefore, their father’s status is compensated by the perceived glamour of gang life, and Rash and Mo’s hyper-macho posturing. Rash and Mo seek alternative masculine role models and reject their parents’ determination to preserve their Egyptian heritage. Berghahn opines that within ghettocentric cinema, hip hop, “with its distinctive music (rap, reggae, DJing, human beat box), break-dancing, slang, fashion and graphics (graffiti and tagging)”, provides a riposte to their parents’ cultural allegiances to a geographically distant homeland and exclusion from a normatively white British culture (2013: 122–23). To this end, hip hop “signifies cultural and generational rebellion and […] serves as an important strategy of cultural hybridisation” (Berghahn, 2013: 123). Contrasting with their parents’ desire to recreate “home” whilst living “abroad”, then, Rash and Mo embrace transcultural lifestyles and reference points that are rooted in African American subcultures but have become increasingly referenced by young European second-generation immigrant communities, such as hip hop. In a similar vein, the aggression, physical prowess, and hyper-masculinity of American cultural icons from a racial or ethnic minority, such as the character of Tony Montana in Scarface (dir. Brian de Palma, 1983) and the boxing champion Muhammad Ali, are referenced by the two brothers and their cohorts, serving as “emblematic embodiments of marginalized masculinity” that compensate for their “lacking access to material goods” (Mennell, qtd. in Berghahn, 2013: 213).
The formation of the male gang in a marginalized, multiracial community such as that in My Brother the Devil is the result of a collective awareness that the socioeconomic possibilities afforded to white, middle-class men seem unattainable. As Raewyn Connell (1995) has claimed, social structures in the form of race, class, and sexuality circumscribe men’s access to money and success, the primary markers of hegemonic masculinity. Connell goes on to argue that when access to traditional means of demonstrating hegemonic masculinity, such as wealth or independence, are stifled then this can result in defensive gender practices like exaggerated emphasis on compulsory heterosexuality, criminality, and violent behaviour. These forms of hyper-masculine behaviour, which Connell terms “protest masculinities”, are “a response to powerlessness, a claim to the gendered position of power, a pressured exaggeration of masculine conventions thereby making a claim to power where there are no real resources for power” (1995: 111). Connell’s theorization speaks to the young men in My Brother the Devil, who are defined negatively by the sum total of their possibilities and so construct a compensatory hyper-masculine identity that overlooks their diverse but marginalized ethno-cultural differences, while foregrounding their masculinity as both a solution to disadvantage and a means of reasserting themselves. For the men who join the gang, violence, (hetero)sexual conquest, and crime become an opportunity to transcend the limited opportunities afforded by their class, race, and cultural background as well as an important resource for reaffirming their claims to (masculine) power. Appropriately, the gang inscribes their veneration of illegal activity as a means of asserting their marginalized subjectivity through their name, “Drugs, Money, Guns” (DMG).
Owing to their common sense of disenfranchisement, the bonds forged between the men in DMG are intimate. The terms used to communicate with each other emphasize their fraternal affiliation, thus fellow gang members are called “cuz”, an abbreviation of “cousin”, “fam”, alluding to “family”, and “bredren”, referring to “brethren” or “brothers”. At one point in the film Mo explains that the gang are his “fam out here”, thereby demonstrating the close-knit nature of the gang. Notions of honour and loyalty are also deeply ingrained in the psyche of the gang. Consequently, violent acts of reprisal are threatened or committed in revenge for misdeeds against their members, such as a plot to enact a reciprocal murder following the murder of a DMG gangster at the hands of a rival group. Affiliative connections are also physically demarcated with tattoos that imprint the gang’s initials, DMG, on their bodies. These tattoos act as “badges of honour”, decipherable only by other gang members, that visually distinguish them from other men and engrave a sense of belonging to the collective onto their bodies. The inclusive and exclusive power of these tattoos is significant — by marking their bodies with the tattoo, the gang members are simultaneously marking their belonging to a social group and excluding other men from the estate. The tattoo, then, works as a talisman that symbolizes dedication to the gang community and their values, as well as signifying a riposte to a normatively white Britain that rigidly casts them into the margins of mainstream society.
However, the young men depend on their peers not only as a source of kinship but also because male gang members grant one another status and prestige within their community. Rash’s sexual success with women and his physical strength, for instance, translate to a comparatively high position within the DMG ranks. Within this logic, women, although vital for the construction of DMG’s heterosexual masculinity, function as tools through which men can exhibit and validate their masculinity for the benefit of other men. With the exception of the protagonist Aisha (played by Letitia Wright), who is discussed below, women are complicit with the hyper-masculine gender constructions performed by DMG gang members. This is illustrated by Rash’s mother Hanan (played by Amira Ghazalla), who accepts her son’s financial subsidies despite knowing the immoral methods through which his money is earned; while young women on the estate with similar backgrounds to the DMG gang members, like Vanessa (played by Elarica Gallacher) and Sonya (played by Yusra Warsama), allow themselves to be manipulated for housekeeping or sexual services to the gang. Other people on the estate are depicted either as customers of DMG’s drug-dealing business or as being intimidated by the gang, therefore legitimizing, in both contexts, the gang’s claims to power over their locale and community.
Indeed, the gang closely aligns with Puar’s writing on the racial and sartorial profiling of a Muslim “other” in the post-9/11 era. Specifically, DMG gang members sport hooded jumpers, a garment which when worn by a non-white male body has long been constructed as a symbol of inherent criminality. Such associations reached their apex in media reportage of the 2011 London riots that coincided with My Brother the Devil’s filming. 6 Correspondingly, the housing estate and its inhabitants are kept under close observation by patrolling police forces or CCTV cameras, which are frequently within the film’s background or foreground shots. Surveillance cameras are particularly prominent during a sequence of photographs that accompany the film’s opening credits. These snapshots, which replicate the black-and-white colour scheme of CCTV recorded images, introduce the locale and thematic backdrop of the film. One image shows a group of young non-white men dressed in hooded jumpers pointing their middle fingers in a sign of defiance at CCTV cameras positioned at the edge of an urban housing estate. The prevalence of surveillance forces within the film accords with Puar’s observations on the marking out of those who appear Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim: “identifiable as actual and potential terrorists, the members of this group are ‘dis-identified’ as citizens” (2007: 38). Many non-white communities, as Puar adds, have been admitted into the familiar stereotyped identity category of the “Arab terrorist”, denominating them in a differential, threatening relation to the (white) nation. Due to their racial-cultural backgrounds, clothing, and appearance, the gang is clearly inscribed within such post-9/11 archetypes of the British Muslim male.
My Brother the Devil replicates this discourse by including a fictional terrorist subplot within the film. Unable to vocalize that the reason behind his brother’s suspicious desertion from the estate is due to a love affair with photographer Sayid, Mo reports that Rash is involved in “terrorist shit”. As news spreads, the young men react with a mixture of admiration and bafflement at Rash’s alleged terrorist connections. One group of men praise him as being “fucking gangster” and ask Mo whether his brother would be able to obtain weapons for them. These words, when coming from hoodie-clad working-class non-white men, offer further evidence of what Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin label a “post-Huntington stereotype” (2011: 116). Drawing on a section of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996) where the writer opines that the mass appeal of transnational cultural forms mean that terrorists are no longer detectable through Islamic dress or outward declarations of piety, Morey and Yaqin note the increasingly prominent figure of the “‘Westernised’ Muslim posing a ‘menacing threat’ from within” in recent cultural production (2011: 115). The conferral of hyper-masculine kudos onto Rash for his supposed involvement in terrorism as well as the young men’s desire to procure firearms offer cultural legitimation to notions that the terrorist threat to Britain exists in non-white, Westernized, and materially deprived working-class communities. In the process, My Brother the Devil’s terrorist subplot inadvertently justifies discourses of surveillance upon multiethnic working-class communities in European suburbs. 7
The film’s parcelling of terrorism and homosexuality also reaffirms the mutually exclusive subject positionings of Muslim and homosexual identities. This is made conspicuous when Rash traces rumours of his involvement in “al-Qaeda shit” to his brother Mo, and Mo responds by declaring: “I’d rather have a brother who was a bomber than a homo”. Likewise, when the gang discovers that the reason behind Rash’s atypical behaviour is due to his homosexual love affair with Sayid, they respond by hatching plans to kill him. Their hatred stems from gender constructions which depend upon sexual encounters with women to express their masculinity and, therefore, power within the community. Specifically, the language used by Repo (played by Aymen Hamdouchi) and Aj (played by Arnold Oceng) to describe Rash evokes a rigid connection between sexuality and power, as Rash is labelled a “batty boy”, implying that he derives pleasure from being anally penetrated. Underpinning their use of the pejorative term is a view that the male’s role in sexual intercourse is exclusively penetrative. By potentially allowing himself to be penetrated by Sayid, Rash has rescinded this supposed sexual dominance and, by extension, permitted himself to be emasculated. DMG’s drive to eradicate Rash is an attempt to wipe out all forms of alleged weakness from their ranks and uphold their vociferous claims to sovereignty.
Aside from these more violent instances of homophobia, Rash’s parents are also uncomfortable with their son’s sexuality, choosing to eject him from the family home. These incidents in the film’s plot have all the markings of what Puar describes as a “discourse attached to immigrant populations and communities of color about a more overt disapproval of homosexuality and a deeply entrenched homophobia” (2007: 22). Puar argues that the homophobia associated with non-white subjects has political motives. She writes that
heteronormative multiculturalism and gay and lesbian liberation are frames that are indebted to the understanding of immigrant families and communities of color as more homophobic than mainstream American families. The descriptor “homophobic culture” elides the workings of economic disparities and the differentiation between cosmopolitan ethnicity and pathological racialization, a feature of neoliberalism’s reproduction of the separation of economic justice from identity politics. (2007: 22)
The projection of an exceptional anti-LGBT prejudice onto immigrant communities, then, passes over crucial socioeconomic questions of why certain portions of society are more homophobic than others, and ignores the way that debates on same-sex marriage, for example, reassert white privileges. In many respects, My Brother the Devil duplicates the discursive production of “Muslim migrant homophobia” through the anti-gay prejudices tied to the pathologically violent gang and Rash’s underprivileged immigrant family. Thus, the multiracial, working-class neighbourhood of the Hackney housing estate is clearly presented as a space of virulent and visceral homophobia.
Whilst it certainly depicts most of its characters as homophobic, the film does root much of the gang’s prejudices in the young men’s shared disenfranchisement. Links between the men’s deprivation and their subscription to a compensatory hyper-masculinity that rests upon aggressive heterosexuality and criminality are transparent when Rash tries to end his association with the gang. At one point in the film, Rash is confronted about his absence from the estate and suspicious affiliation with Sayid. Repo, one of the most pugnacious gang members, points accusatively at his tattoo and barks: “Drugs, Money, Guns! What the fuck else is there for us out here, cuz?” Repo’s statement implies that there are no opportunities for a man such as Rash without the fraternal bonds forged within the group and the gang’s communal allegiance to criminality and violence. In the latter sense, drugs and guns provide the men with money and material goods as well as a platform from which to compensate for their marginalization. Within this construction of a bellicose hyper-masculinity, there is no space for alternative masculine identities that, for example, include same-sex sexuality.
Likewise, Mo’s friend and love interest Aisha (played by Letitia Wright) is also a figure that complicates the uncritical accordance of homophobic views to Muslim immigrants. The hijab-wearing Aisha presses Mo to communicate with his brother despite his discomfort with Rash’s sexuality. Even so, there is little evidence to suggest that Aisha’s advice is driven by a liberal approach to sexual politics. Aisha is one of a handful of female characters, all of whom are peripheral and not as developed as their male counterparts. As such, her open-minded attitude towards Rash is also underdeveloped. Rather, Aisha’s comparatively more tolerant viewpoint fits with her principled outlook as she, for example, resists peer pressure to consume alcohol. In this sense, she encourages Mo to connect with his brother in order that he becomes closer to his family instead of developing his connections with the gang’s criminal lifestyle. Frustratingly, however, her perspective, much like the other female characters’ in the film, is left unexamined.
Despite these caveats, the film still invokes homonationalist discourses, particularly through the character of Rash’s lover Sayid. Tellingly, Sayid lives outside of the homophobic confines of the estate. Sayid’s living arrangements position him as an “outsider” figure geographically, as well as being different from the gang in his nationality, his class positioning, his sexuality, his physical appearance, and his cosmopolitan outlook. A combination of these factors not only differentiates him from the gang, but also highlights Sayid’s respectability and affluence compared to those who live on the estate. Unlike the gang’s preference for hooded jumpers and tracksuit trousers, French Moroccan Sayid cultivates a suave image by wearing freshly-ironed shirts, a leather jacket and glasses. His stylish dress sense visually distinguishes him from the typical subject of profiling. Specifically, his use of spectacles draws on well-established connotations of eyewear with intellect and effeminacy. Corresponding with tropes that associate glasses with acumen, Sayid is well-read and encourages Rash to read about his heritage, namely about Islam and the political situation in his parents’ native Egypt.
Contrasting with the cramped flats that the gang members and their family call home, Sayid lives in a spacious two-floor apartment with a variety of modern contraptions and comforts. Taken out of the parameters of the estate and its parochial worldview, Rash is introduced by Sayid to a more inclusive side of Islam consequent to discussions over the pressures of gang life. The new perspectives offered by Sayid are metaphorically captured in a scene where Sayid drives Rash outside of Hackney and to the shores of the River Thames. Here, Rash remarks that despite spending the entirety of his life in the East London borough, he had never visited the river banks. In this new setting, Sayid mollifies Rash’s existential discomfort with the gang’s amoral ethics by offering him a paid job as his assistant. As Ed Guerrero writes on African American “hood cinema”, the restriction of filmic setting to housing estates acts as a spatial analogy for the lack of opportunities faced by immigrant working-class communities (1993: 104). Therefore, Sayid and Rash’s trip outside of Hackney implies broadened horizons as well as new opportunities and experiences away from the limiting confines of gang mentality.
More broadly, Sayid initiates Rash’s shift from affiliation with the DMG gang towards alternative forms of belonging. Rather than moving towards an inclusive gay or queer community, however, Rash’s trajectory is framed in socioeconomic terms, as the most significant aspect of Sayid’s characterization is his privileged access to financial and material wealth. In essence, Sayid’s depiction accords with the identity politics described by Puar in her concept of homonationalism. As previously outlined, one of the tenets of homonationalist discourse is that upwardly mobile homosexuals and queers are tenuously incorporated within articulations of nationhood due to their potential as economic contributors and consumers. LGBT inclusion within the national narrative is at the simultaneous exclusion of the non-white immigrant subject, who is regarded with suspicion and essentialized as having regressive gender-sexual politics (Puar, 2007). Viewing Sayid’s portrayal alongside the gang and the other communities on the estate, then, the homonationalist binaries that underpin My Brother the Devil’s plot become apparent. Sayid’s sophistication is poised against the brutal and primitive gang, signalling what Puar terms a “Muslim or gay binary” (2007: 15). While Puar writes that this reductive approach to cultural representations of Muslim and homosexual identities generally dictates the queer subject as normatively white, Sayid’s cultural heritage and racial background conform to a negotiation of homonormativity based on neoliberal economic structures, as described thus:
For the ethnic, heteronormativity is negotiable through the market, that is conspicuous consumption and high-skilled labor; for the homonormative, whiteness is mandated by the state but negotiable through the market, again both for labour and consumption. The figure of the queer or homonormative ethnic is crucial for the appearance of diversity in homonormative communities (arriving as the difference of culture rather than as simulacra of capital) and tolerance in ethnic and racialized immigrant communities (marked as an entrance of alternative lifestyle rather than through the commonalities of capital). (Puar, 2007: 28)
Sayid’s lucrative job, accumulative wealth, and faithful consumption closely align his character with the homonormative model outlined by Puar. Moreover, Puar’s comment on the necessity of the non-white subject to support homonormative ideologies as a symbol of diversity whose comparative affluence remains unremarked upon, is especially relevant for examining the schematic depiction of Sayid’s religious faith.
As delineated above, the portrayal of a homosexual Muslim of faith is certainly a rarity amid an increasing viewpoint that to be Muslim is to be axiomatically heterosexual and homophobic. Despite El Hosaini’s admirable representation of a religious Muslim character with a non-normative sexuality, Sayid’s religiosity is underdeveloped and too often conflated with Orientalized discourses of spirituality. Specifically, Sayid lends Rash a copy of the Lebanese writer Khalil Gibran’s book, The Prophet (2013/1923), hoping that it can educate Rash about his religio-cultural heritage and offer him support at a time of vulnerability. However, Gibran’s book is wrongly represented in the film as a biography of the Prophet Muhammad. Rather, The Prophet is a selection of prose poems penned by Gibran, a writer of Christian heritage, which takes teachings of the three major monotheistic religions and reimagines them as the words of a fictional figure. Gibran’s work, which has had a wide readership in the West as the most popular literary text translated from Arabic in the USA, is a puzzling choice to demonstrate Sayid’s faith given its tangential relation to Islam. 8 The book’s familiarity to Western audiences suggests a convenient packaging of Sayid within recognizable and legitimized modes of Islamic belief, therefore endorsing a homonationalist analysis of the film.
My Brother the Devil’s denouement buttresses homonationalist discourse in a scene where Rash’s father forces him to choose between different lifestyles. His father’s ultimatum is either to live with Sayid and incur familial exclusion or to abandon both his lover and career but rejoin his family. The proposal pits Rash’s continued inclusion within the aggregate national, class, religious, ethnic, and racial identities encompassed in the profiled “Muslim population or the ‘terrorist look-alike’ population” (Puar, 2007: 151) against incorporation within an unmonitored homonationalist grouping. His father’s threat to expel Rash only further entrenches perceptions that British working-class non-white communities are irrevocably homophobic and therefore legitimates their exclusion from discourses of national belonging. Consequently, Rash’s decision to move in with Sayid signifies the championing of homonationalist identity politics within the film. Whilst the film’s final shots, which consist of Mo telling Rash that he supports and respects his lifestyle, offer some suggestion of reconciliation and tolerance, this is undercut by the family’s father in the previous scene. The father’s authority upholds homonationalist metonymy in the form of an unwavering patriarch with regressive gender and sexual politics who banishes his son from the family and prevents his wife from seeing her son, on the grounds that he is homosexual. The sequence depicts Rash’s choice in a manner that further ingrains homonationalist patterns of class and sexuality as Rash’s downcast parents are pictured walking away towards a cluster of housing estates while Rash moves in the opposite direction, clutching a motorbike helmet for Sayid’s vehicle. Sayid’s motorbike is symbolically representative of his economic and material wealth as well as his ascendant status within society. Despite seeming to challenge Puar’s binary, the film fortifies perceptions of the homophobic Muslim “other” and champions the homonormative through the characters of Sayid and, eventually, Rash.
My Brother the Devil is commendable in its attempt to tackle a contentious and sensitive subject that has received scarce cinematic representation. However, the film’s conclusion succumbs to pervasive homonationalist discourses. Indeed, by the end of the feature, the central conflict emerges as a binary opposition between “backward” values, as personified in the murderous gang and Rash’s family on the one hand, and Rash’s personal happiness with Sayid, on the other. Furthermore, throughout the film’s trajectory, Sayid is always portrayed as worthy of the audience’s respect through his affable nature and contributions to the British economy. It is through this dualistic positioning that the film unintentionally colludes with an emergent British homonationalism.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.