Abstract
This chapter reviews scholarly controversies about responses to state violence targeting people for their sexual orientation or sex identities (SOSI) in a global perspective. It describes the emergence of legal strategies in the United States and Europe in the 1970s to 1990s to counter SOSI discrimination, as well as the responses to the use of these strategies in postcolonial African countries and nation-states created in the aftermath of the Ottoman, British, and French Empires, as well as in revolutionary Iran. The chapter analyzes the scholarship on anti-SOSI backlashes tied to critiques of US and European imperialism and militarism. Campaigns for SOSI inclusion in the heteronormative, reproductive nation-state are distinguished from queer agendas attacking the nation-state. The chapter concludes by raising questions about whether authors who attack liberal or queer anti-nationalist politics in Muslim or postcolonial contexts are tacitly or overtly supporting nationalist agendas and failing to provide remedies to restrain violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation or sexed identities.
