tender

After the nature documentary we walk down,
into the plaza of art galleries and high end clothing stores
where the mock orange is fragrant in the summer night
and the smooth adobe walls glow flesh-like in the dark.
It is just our second date, and we sit down on a rock,
holding hands, not looking at each other,
and if I were a bull penguin right now I would lean over
and vomit softly into the mouth of my beloved
and if I were a peacock I’d flex my gluteal muscles to
erect and spread the quills of my cinemax tail.
If she were a female walking stick bug she might
insert her hypodermic proboscis delicately into my neck
and inject me with a rich hormonal sedative
before attaching her egg sac to my thoracic undercarriage,
and if I were a young chimpanzee I would break off a nearby tree limb
and smash all the windows in the plaza jewelry stores.
And if she was a Brazilian leopard frog she would wrap her impressive
tongue three times around my right thigh and
pummel me lightly against the surface of our pond
and I would know her feelings were sincere.
Instead we sit awhile in silence, until
she remarks that in the relative context of tortoises and iguanas,
human males seem to be actually rather expressive.
And I say that female crocodiles really don’t receive
enough credit for their gentleness.
Then she suggests that it is time for us to go
Do something personal, hidden, and human.

Corporate posturing to marginalized groups — what University of Denver law professor Nancy Leong describes as racial capitalism — has long been a business practice to persuade minority groups to become brand loyal and liberal consumers to buy products as a political statement.

In January, L’Oréal Paris announced its “unique and disruptive” hair care ad campaign, featuring model and social media influencer Amena Khan. In the ad, she wore a pale pink hijab, with a pink blazer, in front of a pink background. Within a week, Khan left the campaign after her tweets criticizing Israel for its attack on Gaza in 2014 were surfaced. In a statement, L’Oréal Paris agreed with her decision to step down, saying that the company is “committed to tolerance and respect towards all people.”

Brands “want the face, but they don’t want the complex politics or the identity or the voice behind it,” Hoda Katebi, a political fashion blogger and community organizer, told The Intercept, pointing to her own experiences with brands that have approached her to collaborate or model their clothing. “Once a Muslim woman asserts her agency, they’ll strip that away.

That increased representation is meaningful to some Muslim women cannot be ignored. However, who gets to be seen and how exposes the underlying logics of capitalism that flatten visibility into which Muslim women are the most marketable.

The market homogenizes Muslim women, collapsing tremendous diversity into a product that can be easily digested. “Certain kinds of representation and visibility are privileged, while others are rendered undesirable,” write Duke University associate professor Ellen McLarney and University of North Carolina associate professor Banu Gökariksel. “Muslim identities unpalatable to the sensibilities of the market are excluded, often leading to further marginalizations at the intersections of class, race, and ethnicity.”

This is evident in how the fashion and beauty industries grant visibility to certain Muslim women. Writing about the “hijab fetish” in consumer culture, Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik described how representations of Muslim women in advertising conform to “an image of an over-filtered, hot, bourgeois, fair-skinned hijabi woman, whose highlight is ‘on fleek’.”

These responses to migration draw on fantasies of national purity and a fear of change that is exploited by politicians. The exclusion of others from resources and opportunity is based on the idea that the in-group should be protected no matter what, with little regard for what effect it might have on the other and without questioning why there is a distinction between “us” and “them” in the first place. Rather than hard lines around nations of people and their homelands, political borders are systems for controlling land and resources and limiting the movement of people. The “nations” they enclose are not long-term historical realities, but new political communities that developed with the emergence of states and borders. In Foucault’s terms, maps of bordered territorial states are regimes of truth that establish what is true and legitimate in society. They justify some claims to land and history, while marking others as false and not worthy of consideration. These regimes are not fundamental truths that are universal; they are set of agreements within a particular society that establish a set of rules to decide what is true, but it does not have to be that way.

The moment when a limit is reached, when there is nothing ahead but darkness: something comes in to help that is not real. Another way all this is like madness: a mad person not helped out of his trouble begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him.