Figuring (out) Omar Mateen

Who is Omar Mateen, really? 

If we have learned anything this past week,
it is that figuring out who Omar Mateen is involves figuring Omar Mateen.

What does it mean to figure Omar
Mateen?  It means to condense our shared
biases and popular imaginaries into words or images that attach themselves to
the person, Omar Mateen. This is what
Donald Trump does when he describes Mateen as an
agent of ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ or what Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick
does when he
seems to imply Mateen is first an agent of Christian Biblical justice
against homosexuals and then among its just victims, because homosexuals 'reap
what they sow'.  Statements that
reduce Mateen to ‘a radical Islamic terrorist’ or ‘an agent of Christian
justice’ make Mateen carry complex and often contradictory understandings of
things like gender, race, nation, religion and homo/bi/trans*phobias that may
or may not correspond to facts. 

Mateen’s victims are figured in equally
contentious ways. While Mateen
reportedly targeted Orlando’s gay nightclub Pulse on a Latinx themed night
where he killed 49 and injured 53 mostly queers of color and their allies (most but not all of
whom were Latinx), commentators like Sky News presenter Mark Longhurst erase
the homophobias, biphobias, trans*phobias and racisms of the massacre
when he straightsplaines to The Guardian’s Owen Jones that Mateen’s targets
were ‘all humans’. At the same time,
those who recognize the homo/bi/trans*phobias of the massacre often figure
Mateen’s victims as universal ‘LGBTs’, whose presumed whiteness erases
how Mateen’s victims are racialized as brown, black and/or Hispanic.

While figurations
are neither true nor false, we gravitate toward them because they map the
world in simplistic yet orderly ways. Yet it is only by digging into what makes these figurations possible
that we can take on their contestable maps of the world. In this case, this requires understanding the
two sets of maneuvers that make figurations of Mateen and his victims possible.

The first set of maneuver draws upon
dominant western understandings and biases about development, im/migration, and
terrorism to explain who Omar Mateen and his victims really are. In the abstract, these accounts not only posit ‘the West’ against ‘the Rest’ in ways that always
seem to evidence the superiority of ‘the West’. 
They distil western biases about development, im/migration, and
terrorism into western development and security narratives. 

These
narratives express how the figure of ‘the enlightened, racially whitened,
Christian, bourgeois, able-bodied, modern, developed Westerner originating from
the global North’ is threatened, destabilized and insecured by the figure of
‘the intolerant, racially darkened, non-Christian, underclassed, disabled,
traditional, underdeveloped or undevelopable global Southerner’. These threats are especially acute, so this
story goes, when ‘the underdeveloped’ and ‘the undevelopable’ move from South
to North as ‘the unwanted im/migrant’ (whose presumed desire for assimilation
may fail) and ‘the terrorist’ (whose presumed desire is not to assimilate into
‘the West’ but to destroy it).

As
they are applied to the figure of Omar Mateen, these narratives are said to
arise from verifiable facts about Mateen. Mateen is a second generation Afghan American US citizen. He worked for the security firm G4S. He reportedly beat his first wife. He called 911 to declare his allegiance to ISIS while he held
hostage, killed and wounded Pulses’s mostly queer Latinx patrons. He had previously declared his allegiance to
Hezbollah and to al Qaeda.

Blended
together, these abstract understandings and reported facts about Mateen figure
him as not just the son of ‘underdeveloped’ immigrants from what President
George W. Bush described after 9/11 as ‘the dark corners of the world’. Marteen is also figured as ‘the unwanted
immigrant’ himself, whose toxic intolerances of women, LGBTQ+ people and
non-Muslims further figure him as an ‘undevelopable’ threat who deployed his
security skills to terrorize ‘real Americans’. 

The second set of maneuvers draws upon dominant western understandings of homosexuality and ‘the homosexual’ to figure Mateen
and his victims. 

In these contemporary western narratives, two
dominant figurations of ‘the homosexual’ circulate – ‘the perverse
homosexual’ and ‘the normal homosexual’. According to this story, ‘the perverse homosexual’ is that figure who westerners until recently believed accurately described all homosexuals. Yet these days enlightened westerners
recognize that ‘the homosexual’ (who has been whitened and brightened into ‘the
LGBT’) is just another loving human being who happens to love someone of
the same sex. This makes ‘the LGBT’ as
normal as any other loving human being.

What complicates this progressive story of western enlightenment is
how understandings of homosexuality and 'the homosexual' as perverse have long
been and stubbornly remain embedded in deeply racialized understandings of
development, im/migration and terrorism.

So in addition to all the other things the
figure of ‘the developed’ conveys in western narratives, ‘the developed’ is
also a heterosexual
and cisgendered figure who is reproductive on behalf of the western couple,
family, nation, and global order.  In contrast, ‘the underdeveloped’ is figured as not yet having matured
into ‘properly’ (re)productive sexuality. And the ‘undevelopable’ is that version of ‘the underdeveloped’ who will
never mature into ‘properly’ (re)productive sexuality.

Since their embrace of ‘the normal loving
LGBT’, enlightened westerners believe sexual maturity
is something homosexuals can also achieve. 
But they still understand
sexual maturity in developmental terms – personally and
geopolitically. Personally, ‘the
underdeveloped’ can become ‘the developed’ as either a heterosexual or a
homosexual (although development narratives have more problems with bi, queer
and trans* expressions of sexuality). Geopolitically,
nation-states can become ‘developed’ when they recognize that ‘gay
rights are human rights’.

As enlightened as these western narratives
seem to be, they preserve
‘the perverse homosexual’ as a developmentally immature or unmaturable
figure  who they locate primarily in the
global South. This has implications
for how ‘the unwanted im/migrant’ and ‘the terrorist’ are figured. 

‘The unwanted im/migrant’ becomes the carrier
of dangerous ‘civilizational’ sexualities and/or dangerous intolerances toward
sexual minorities who has not (yet) achieved development in the global
South and who threatens to reproduce dangerous offspring and sexual attitudes
if/when they arrive in the global North. ‘The terrorist’ becomes the
carrier of ‘civilizational barbarism’ as the perverse, undevelopable
outsider in relation to the couple, family, national and global order who seeks
to invade and destroy the global North.  ‘The terrorist’ is also
dangerously reproductive, sometimes of offspring and attitudes and other
times of terrorist cells and networks. 

These imaginaries, narratives and mappings
of the world are embedded in figurations of Omar Mateen and his victims. They are elaborated through a series of
dichotomous understandings of ‘the homosexual’ – as perverse vs. normal, as
(self-)hating vs. loving, as racially darkened, Islamicized and disabled (in
this case, as mentally ill) vs. racially whitened, Christianized and
able-bodied/neuro-typical (in this case, as rationally enlightened).

The result is an image of Mateen as ‘the
self-hating, racially darkened, global Southern, perverse Muslim homosexual’
whose ‘civilizational barbarism’ drove him to brutally attack hundreds of
‘all-loving, racially whitened, western assimilated or assimilable, mature or
maturable, presumptively Christian, normal LGBTs’, in an act that reproduced
and is reproductive of contagious, uncontained ‘radical Islamic terrorism’.  He is the western figure of ‘the monster, terrorist, fag’,
who Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai explain has been circulating in US discourse since
the War on Terror. 

At the same time, Mateen’s victims are
themselves figured as ‘unwanted im/migrants’, whose presumed race, presumed
Hispanic ethnicity and queerness exceeds and troubles their whitewashed
figuration as ‘LGBTs’. This makes it
more difficult for many US Americans to grieve
them, as the many
homophobic and racist tweets celebrating Mateen’s attack evidence.

Overall, these figurations of Mateen and
his victims not only shift all the blame for this incident onto people from
‘the global South’ and obscure how US
gun culture, US
misogynies, US
Hispanophobias and other racisms,
and US
homo/bi/trans*phobias create their own toxic
brands of ‘US Americanness’. In so
doing, they reaffirm the need for western-style global development, stronger
deterrents against South to North im/migration, and further fortifications of
the US nation-state and more generally ‘the West’ in the name of national and
global security. 

We can neither fully understand nor politically
oppose these contentious agendas without appreciating how Mateen, his victims,
and ‘Westerners in general’ are figured through western stories about
development, im/migration, terrorism and
sexualities. To achieve this, we
must do more than ask, ‘Who is Omar Mateen?’ We must understand how asking and answering this question reifies contestable
figurations of ‘the homosexual’ in western narratives about development,
im/migration and terrorism to organize and affirm contemporary formations of
power. 

And we must continue to develop practical
strategies that allow us to think and to act otherwise. At  a
minimum, those of us figured as ‘good westerners’ and/or as ‘good LGBTs’ should
decenter ourselves more. We should
foreground the voices of those who bear these figurations in the most harmful
and immediate ways, like queer, transgender and non-binary people of
color. For it is primarily their
challenges that are producing
the most powerful narratives and practical strategies to undermine how these
figurations damagingly and dangerously map the world.