[Reader-list] Mahmud Can't Be A Pilot

[NAEEM MOHAIEMEN]

I have an essay <Why Mahmud Can't Be A Pilot> in the
new anthology <<Nobody Passes>> (Matt Bernstein
Sycamore ed.).

Matt/Mattilda is the editor of <<That’s Revolting!
Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation>>;
<<Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving>> and
the instigator of <Gay Shame: A Virus in the System>,
a radical queer activist group that "fights the
monster of assimilation".

Details below, including an excerpt.

Naeem Mohaiemen
http://disappearedinamerica.org

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Amazon: Nobody Passes
http://tinyurl.com/ybl3qq

Blog: Nobody Passes, Darling
http://nobodypasses.blogspot.com

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[Excerpt from "Why Mahmud Can't Be A Pilot"]

Halfway through the weekend, I realized the
unintended, dual track of the speaker selection.  The
Muslim speakers were all in the "angry activist"
ghetto -- the rapper, the comedian, and the filmmaker
were talking about racial profiling, war on terror,
civil liberties.  The rest of the conference seemed to
be on a planet called "Spelling Bee Champion Honors
Student Most Likely To Succeed."  High-profile
speakers included a former White House CFO, bankers,
TV reporters, and a physical trainer.  This half of
the conference stayed on message: We're not just
gear-heads in Bangalore call centers.  We can do
anything.  "It's the best time for South Asians in
America," one speaker said.

A triumphant narrative of a dream life.
 .......

On the other side of the Atlantic, the underclass
positioning of Muslim migrants is even more sharply
visible.  A 2005 survey found British Indians and West
Indians outperforming their white working-class peers
in education and jobs.  This was especially visible
for the "1.5" generation, children of the great wave
of post-colonial migration. But in the same survey,
two other Asian groups came in at the bottom:
Bangladeshis and Pakistanis.  For Asian Muslims, there
are conjoined problems of spiraling unemployment,
societal disenfranchisement, and voluntary
self-isolation.  The ghettoization is particularly
marked for women. Unemployed men still find gathering
spaces in local clubs, community centers, mosques, and
streets.  For the women, however, absence in the
workplace is conflated with a larger absence from
daily life. The Muslim woman in a western city has
lately become an all-purpose signifier. For Muslim
men, she needs to be "protected" from a sexually
curious and omnivorous society.  For western liberals
(and lately conservatives), the woman in hijab is the
ultimate missionary project.  Simultaneously
mysterious, exotic, sexual, and repulsive -- they are
shrouded figures ("ninja" to some Bengali wags)
needing a rescue mission to free them from the
clutches of tradition and Muslim men.

Pop-Sociologists look to religion for an easy formula
to explain the stratified Asian underclass.  But these
equations obscure more than they clarify.  In London,
Bengali women are rarely seen working in non-family
owned stores.  Yet, in New York, they are a familiar
presence in the service economy.  Differing migration
patterns are a bigger influence than religion.  The
bulk of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi migration to
England came from rural and working-class communities
in underdeveloped areas (Pakistanis from Mirpur and
Kashmir, Bangladeshis from Sylhet).[5]  By contrast,
the Asian migration to the U.S. went through a
restrictive filter of job categories, student visas,
or family reunification, resulting in a more educated
immigration pool.[6]

The Economist recently concluded that, even after
9/11, Muslims have better opportunities in the U.S.
than in Europe. In line with its ideological stance,
the magazine lays the blame for Europe's "Muslim
problem" on the mammaries of the welfare state.[7] 
The problem, it seems, is the "excessive generosity"
of the European state, which "encourages" Muslims to
be lazy loafers.  Dutch law professor Afshin Ellian
posits,
Five years ago, my Afghan sister-in-law emigrated to
the United States, where she now works, pays taxes and
takes part in public life.... In Europe, she would
still be undergoing treatment from social workers for
her trauma--and she still wouldn't have got a job or
won acceptance as a citizen.[8]

These formulations fit smoothly with the apocalyptic
fears of British journalist Melanie Phillips, who
talks about the growing danger from "home-grown
Jihadis."[9]

More nuanced writers, such as Sukhdev Sandhu, also
detect signs of a transcontinental divide in
opportunities.  Exploring the devastated town of
Manningham (scene of 1995 and 2001 race riots with
Asian youth fighting police and white gangs), he
documents the pervasive sense of dead-end life for
Pakistani migrants:
Ambitious local kids feel themselves orphaned, doubly
anachronistic.... So they flee...  In New York last
year I found myself in a cab driven by a Bradford
Pakistani who had spent the previous four decades
working in a factory [in England].  'Why did I stay so
long there?' he cried.  'No opportunity, no future. 
Pure waste.'[10]

Maybe things will be all right for Mahmud, after all? 
At least he's not in Europe? More of a future on this
side? American "dream", land of endless opportunity?

Mahmud's would-be profession is one rare time that
being a woman could reduce potential friction.  In
spite of the example of Leila Khaled and other female
hijackers, the "terrorist profile" remains the Muslim
male.  This is not to say women are not checked at
airports, but within a different calculation -- an
"unknowing" mule or a seduced naif.  So a Mahmuda may
have a slightly easier time in this profession.  But
then again, crazy patriarchy and power insecurities
will trip up a female pilot in other ways anyway.

I'm thinking now of the mysterious Egypt Air crash of
a few years ago.  Flight 990 suddenly went into a
nosedive and then pulled rapidly back up -- so rapidly
that the structure ruptured and the plane plunged to
destruction.  To this date no one knows what happened,
but the fact that the pilot was heard saying, "I place
myself in the hand of Allah" was taken as evidence of
a suicidal impulse.  Another way troubles could start
for Mahmud.  Yes, you may not be a crazy terrorist,
but you may just be plain crazy.

[End of Excerpt]

##########################
Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and
Conformity
Edited by Matt Bernstein Sycamore
##########################

Table Of Contents

Reaching Too Far: An Introduction, Mattilda, a.k.a.
Matt Bernstein Sycamore

All Mixed Up and No Place to Go: Inhabiting Mixed
Consciousness on the Margins, Nico Dacumos

Friction Burn: A Nonfiction Admission, Stacey May
Fowles

Who’s That Wavin’ That Flag?, Jessica Hoffmann

Undermining Gender Regulation, Dean Spade

Passing Last Summer, Dominika Bednarska

Innocent Victims and Brave New Laws: State Protection
and the Battered Women’s Movement, Priya Kandaswamy

Different Types of Hunger: Finding My Way Through
Generations of Okie Migration, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

What I Learned from Being G Minus in the World of
Homohop Commerce, Ralowe T. Ampu, DDS

No Longer Just American, Stephanie Abraham

The End of Genderqueer, Rocko Bulldagger

My Kind of Cruising, Liz Rosenfeld

Pino’s Father, Tommi Avicolli Mecca

Trans-portation, Terre Thaemlitz

Melchizedek’s Three Rings, Carole McDonnell

Behind These Mascaraed Eyes: Passing Life in Prison,
Nikki Lee Diamond

Race Haunted, Otherwise, Eric Stanley

Why Mahmud Can't Be A Pilot, Naeem Mohaiemen

F2Mestizo, Logan Gutierrez-Mock

Persephone, Helen Boyd

Hat, Tucker Lieberman

“And Then You Cut Your Hair:” Genderfucking on the
Femme Side of the Spectrum, Amy André and Sandy Chang

Surface Tensions, Jen Cross

Origins, Kirk Read

Lack of Close Friends or Confidants, Jennifer
Blowdryer

>From Hot Pink to Code Pink: Notes on Passing for
Monolingual Folk, Irina Contreras

Not Quite Queer, Benjamin Shepard
#############################

Stephanie Abraham spends her time making feminist
media, teaching elementary school, and dancing salsa.
She has just completed her M.A. in Cultural Studies at
California State University, Los Angeles, where she
specialized in the representation of Arabs in
Hollywood film and television, and founded the
feminist magazine LOUDmouth.

Ralowe T. Ampu, DDS is a white academic living as a
black asshole in sunny, progressive San Francisco in a
loft space with a view of the Hunters Point Naval
Shipyard. When she’s not working with Gavin Newsom to
rid the city of homeless youth or carrying the banner
for the pro-life contingent of the San Francisco LGBT
Pride Parade and Celebration, she shit glitter on
mikes with those Divas on Depakote
(http://www.divsoffdeps.com). She’s a lonely
agoraphobe, so give her a call at (415) 863-3249. Talk
to me.

Amy André is a 31-year-old femme bisexual
African-American Jew. With a master’s degree in
sexuality studies from San Francisco State University,
Amy is a sexual health educator, researcher, and
published author. In addition, she recently directed
her first film, On My Skin, a short documentary about
a mixed-race transgender man; see
www.BlackAndWhiteAllOver.com for details. For more on
Amy, please visit:
www.AmyAndre.com.

Dominika Bednarska is a doctoral student in English
and Disability Studies at UC Berkeley.  She has been
published in Ghosting Atoms: Poems and Reflections
Sixty Years After the Bomb, Medicinal Purposes: A
Literary Review, and What I Want From You: Voices of
East Bay Lesbian Poets (forthcoming). She is currently
working on her first chapbook and planning to
eventually perform her work as a one-woman show.

Jennifer Blowdryer’s most recent book is Good Advice
for Young Trendy People of All Ages (Manic D Press).
She has an MFA from Columbia, has taught Satire at
Marymount Manhattan, and in 1988 founded Smut Fests,
an early forum for sex workers, burlesque, and spoken
word. Her plays White Trash Debutante has been
performed at Theater Rhino in SF and the Bowery Poetry
Club in NYC. She is a frequent contributor to New York
Press, and is currently compiling interviews with
people who are chronically ejected from venues.
Jenniferblowdryer.com.

Ruth Blandón is a graduate student in English
literature at USC whose research interests include
transamerican modernisms and color-based passing.  She
is the daughter of immigrants from Nicaragua.

Aura Bogado is a Los Angeles–based print and radio
journalist .Her April 2006 article critiquing dominant
responses to the current immigrant-rights movement,
“On the Myth of Sleeping Giants,” has been widely
circulated. She is an immigrant from Argentina.

Helen Boyd is the author of My Husband Betty, which
was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.  Her blog
(en)gender is widely read by people interested in
queer, trans, and gender issues.  She lives with her
partner Betty in Brooklyn, New York, where she is
currently working on her next book, She’s Not the Man
I Married, which will be published during the winter
of 2007.

Rocko Bulldagger is a feminist polyamorous sex radical
queer living in Brooklyn, NY.  She works in education
by day and obsesses over politics, philosophy and
sexuality by night.  “The End of Genderqueer”
originally appeared in her zine Bleached Blonde
Bimbos.   Rocko’s beloved affiliations include Queer
As Fuck, The House of Freak, 2000 Queers, The Short
Peoples’ Revolution and The Bent Stiletto Social Club.

 Sandy C. Chang is a queer Chinese American born and
raised in the San Francisco Bay
Area. A singer/songwriter and dancer, Sandy also
performs as a drag king, going by the name of
Charleston Chu. Sandy has a Ph.D. in Clinical
Psychology from the California School of Professional
Psychology in San Francisco. Sandy currently lives in
Brooklyn,
NY, with a pug named Theo.

Irina Contreras is an artist, writer and all-around
misunderstood scorpio living in the hills of Elysian
Park in Los Angeles.  Atop one fine hill sits the
F-Haus, a cinderblock modernist disaster in which she
resides with her six roommates and many lizards.
Raised close by in the Pacoima area, she was
"abducted" by a young age by the older funny colored
hair girls who luckily rescued her from the plague of
what could have been in the San Fernando Valley to
instead go to shows and work on zines.  Currently, she
is acting as editor-in-chief of the 2006 year of
LOUDmouth Magazine, as well as writing, performing and
making shit in other capacities.

Jen Cross is a writer, writing group facilitator, and
co-collaborator in the dyke erotica collective, Dirty
Ink. Her stories will soon have appeared (some as Jen
Collins) in a dozen anthologies, including Set In
Stone, Back to Basics, Best Fetish Erotica, and
Glamour Girls and Naughty Spanking Stories A-Z 2.
Often read as a midwestern white queer girl incest
survivor, she believes in attempting to communicate
even when deep interlocution seems inherently futile.

Nico Dacumos is a Special Education teacher,
performer, and writer. He develops workshops exploring
race, queerness, sex, and love, and workshops
comparing political movements. Workshops have been
presented for Mount Holyoke and Smith College,
Sistersong, Georgians for Choice, Body Positive
Atlanta, and the CLPP Program at Hampshire College. He
has also performed at venues such as Highways
Performance Space, TMI Queer Salon, Valley Arts
Festival, and for the Community Organizing Campaign
(CYOC). Stalk him at http://nicoelrico.blogspot.com.
Nikki Lee Diamond spent 26 years in prison, and is
very glad to be out.  She would like to thank Alex
Lee, Nat Smith and the Trans/Gender Variant in Prison
Committee (TIP) of California Prison Focus.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a writer, social activist,
historian, and university professor.  She grew up in
rural Oklahoma, daughter of a landless farmer and
half-Indian mother.  Most recently, she has published
a historical memoir trilogy:  Red Dirt: Growing Up
Okie (1997; 2006) Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War
Years, 1960-1975 (2002): Blood on the Border: A Memoir
of the Contra War  (2005).   Earlier books include: 
The Great Sioux Nation: An Oral History of the Sioux
Nation and its Struggle for Sovereignty; Roots of
Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico,
1680-1980 and Indians of the Americas: Human Rights
and Self-Determination.  "Different Types of
Hunger..." is adapted from Red Dirt, originally
published by Verso and recently republished by the
University of Oklahoma.
Fritz Flohr is a 22 year old faggot of female to male
transsexual experience. He does not identify as
“Mentally Ill”, but rather as a Survivor of
Psychiatric Abuse. Fritz enjoys pigeons and
sauerkraut. Read his anti-psychiatry zine at
http://www.pigeonpress.org/againstpsychiatry.html He
is currently soliciting contributions from fellow
psychiatric survivors for a new zine about psychiatric
abuse, and is particularly interested in essays
exploring the connections between psychiatric and
sexual abuse. Fritz can be reached via email at
againstpsychiatry at yahoo.com.
Stacey May Fowles is a writer based in Toronto. Her
exhibited, text-based artwork has asked the world to
apologize and helped women have g-spot orgasms, while
her writing has appeared in Fireweed, subTERRAIN, Kiss
Machine and Hive. Her first novel, broken plate
ideology: a collective recollection, is forthcoming
with Tightrope Books in Fall 2007, and she is
currently working on a collection of short stories.
You can find her at www.staceymayfowles.com.

Logan Gutierrez-Mock is a biracial (Chicano/white),
middle-class, 26-year-old, queer tranny boy.  He has
an M.A. in Human Sexuality Studies and is a graduate
student in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State
University.  He sits on the Board of Directors for
Interracial Family Pride (www.ipride.org), an agency
serving mixed heritage and transracially adopted youth
and their families.  His interests include: youth
empowerment, comprehensive sex education, queer
Latinidad, people of color with white skin privilege,
and researching mixed heritage/transracially adopted
queer and transgender people.  He talks to his mother
every day, he wants to own a small, fluffy gay dog and
he is a fierce advocate of the color pink.  He can be
reached at logangutierrezmock at yahoo.com.

Jessica Hoffmann is an LA-based writer and editor. She
covered the May 1, 2006, immigrants-rights actions in
Los Angeles for The NewStandard. Her maternal
great-great grandparents immigrated from the same
Jewish village in Austria to the Bronx. The paternal
story is a little more hazy, with German Protestant
antecedents arriving in New Orleans sometime in the
mid-nineteenth century and no living descendants
seeming to know much of anything about the British
folks on Dad’s Mom’s side.

Vanessa Huang is a first-generation Chinese-American
organizer and writer presently working in Oakland, CA,
as the communications director at Justice Now, a
human-rights organization that works with people in
women’s prisons and local communities to build a safe,
compassionate world without prisons. She was a student
and organizer in Providence, Rhode Island, during the
major immigrants-rights actions of spring 2006.

Priya Kandaswamy teaches in the Women’s Studies
department at Portland State University.  Her work
examines the intersections of race, gender, class and
sexuality in the U.S. welfare state’s efforts to
regulate sexuality, control labor, and police the
boundaries of citizenship.

Tucker Lieberman studied Philosophy at Brown
University and Journalism at Boston University.  His
reflections on masculinity, body, and spirit received
Brown University’s Casey Shearer Creative Nonfiction
Award in 2002. A memoir about living outdoors appeared
in Fresh Yarn in 2005.  He lives indoors with his
fiancé, Dan, in Rhode Island.

Carole McDonnell’s fiction, devotionals, poetry and
essays have appeared in print and online. Her works
appear in several religious, female, ethnic and
speculative fiction anthologies including So Long Been
Dreaming: Post-colonialism in science fiction, Jigsaw
Nation: Tales of Secession. She has written a Bible
study called The Easy Way to Write and Teach Bible
Studies. Her website is:
www.geocities.com/scifiwritir/OreoBlues.html She lives
with her husband, their two sons, and their ferocious
tabby Ralphina.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical working-class
Southern Italian queer writer, performer and activist
whose work has been published in many anthologies over
the past 35 years. He is author of Between Little Rock
and a Hard Place and co-editor of Hey Paesan: Writings
by Italian Gays and Lesbians. He works by day helping
tenants fight gentrification and eviction in San
Franciso. His web page is www.avicollimecca.com.

Naeem Mohaiemen is a filmmaker and artist.  He
co-created Visible Collective
(disappearedinamerica.org), a series of art
interventions on post-9/11 security panic.  Project
excerpts have shown as installations or lectures,
including the 2006 Whitney Biennial (Wrong Gallery). 
Other projects include Muslims or Heretics: My Camera
Can Lie (UK House of Lords), Young Man Was No Longer
Terrorist (Dictionary of War, Munich), and Between
Devil & Deep Blue (Asia Society).

Kirk Read is the author of How I Learned to Snap. He
is an HIV counselor at St. James Infirmary, a free
clinic for sex workers in San Francisco. He is working
on a novel and a collection of essays. He performs
frequently and curates evenings of spoken word and
performance, including an open mic in the culturally
anorexic Castro called Smack Dab. He’s an avid hiker
and backpacker. His website is www.kirkread.com.

Liz Rosenfeld is a New York based filmmaker and
performance artist who secretly fantasizes about
staring in a Broadway revival of Hair. Her work deals
with lost histories, feminism, and community in
relation to queer identity and politics. She has an
MFA from The Art Institute of Chicago, and she is
currently an MA candidate in the Performance Studies
Program at The Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Liz’s
work has been screened nationally and internationally.

Mariana Ruiz is a union organizer in New York City.
Many of the workers she works with are recent
immigrants. She is a daughter of immigrants and a
member of the progressive Cuban community. She is
particularly interested in the impact that recent
immigrants have on labor policy in the United States.

Clio Reese Sady is a zine-writing, political
poster-making, self defense-teaching, college-educated
queer from Portland, Oregon. She owes her analysis of
Queering Femininity to tireless processing with
everyone in the Portland queer feminist revival and
especially to Adele, Jordan, Silke, Tuesday,
Valentine, Morgan, Michelle, Miel, and Tessa.
Additionally, political conversations with Elos and
Usnea have supplied me with endless inspiration.

Benjamin Shepard, PhD, is the author of White Nights
and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San
Francisco AIDS Epidemic (Cassell, 1997) and co-editor
of From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community
Building in the Era of Globalization (Verso, 2002).  
He got his start with the Bay Area Reporter.  Since
then, he has played with ACT UP, SexPanic!, Reclaim
the Streets, CIRCA, Absurd Response, Housing Works,
and Times UP!  Send correspondence to:
benshepard at mindspring.com.  "Not Quite Queer" is
dedicated to Eric Rofes, who first encouraged me to
write a draft of this essay in 1998, and later read a
draft of this updated version in June 2006, just weeks
before he died.

Dean Spade is an attorney and activist, and the
founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a law
collective providing free legal services to low-income
trans people and trans people of color.  His writing
has appeared in the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, the
Chicano-Latino Law Review, the Widener Law Review,
GLQ, and several anthologies.  Dean is also co-editor
of the online journal makezine.org.

Eric A. Stanley is a high school dropout turned
underground academic in the History of Consciousness
program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
S/he is currently writing a dissertation on the
politics of queer affect and the relationship between
violence, sovereignty and State terror by looking at
the HIV/AIDS genocide and lynching of queer/ trans
people. Eric also works with the radical queer
direct-action collective, Gay Shame. Eric can be
reached at queeriot at yahoo.com

Terre Thaemlitz is an award winning multi-media
producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio
remixer, DJ and owner of the Comatonse Recordings
record label. Her work critically combines themes of
identity politics - including gender, sexuality,
class, linguistics, ethnicity and race - with an
ongoing critique of the socio-economics of commercial
media production. He has released 14 solo albums, as
well as numerous 12-inch singles and video works. Her
writings on music and culture have been published
internationally in a number of books, academic
journals and magazines. As a speaker and educator on
issues of non-essentialist transgenderism and
queerness, Thaemlitz has participated in panel
discussions throughout Europe and Japan. He currently
resides in Kawasaki, Japan. “Trans-portation" was
adapted from the electroacoustic radio drama
"Trans-Sister Radio," a program about transgendered
travel and migration, developed for the German
broadcaster Hessischer Rundfunk (premiere November 14,
2004), and co-issued on CD by the Portuguese labels
Grain of Sound and Base Recordings (December 12, 2005)



 
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