A response to Ali, Beckford, Bhatt, Modood and Woodhead.

It is an honour for me to respond to these interesting and diverse responses to my essay, ‘Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time’. There are many strands to the paper, and my interlocutors appropriately point out where some of them might be further woven.They underscore as well some need for distinction and elaboration that strike me as very right or, indeed, ‘spot on’. I’d like to make use of this opportunity to think further about some of the more general issues raised by these responses to do with the appropriate framework for analyses of this kind. One question is whether the frameworks of pluralism, rights-based discourses, and multiculturalism can address the full range of issues introduced by the appropriation of a discourse on sexual freedom for the purposes of anti-immigrant politics; another pertains to the question of whether an alliance between sexual and religious minorities is possible. I would like to begin by citing Chetan Bhatt’s remark that ‘in sociology, cultural theory or cultural studies, many of us assume a field of truths . . . a (albeit contested) field of theoretical intelligibility for understanding or describing “Self”, “Other”, the subject, identity, culture’ (Bhatt 2008: 28). He remarks as well, ‘I am no longer sure these concepts necessarily have the expansive capacity to speak to the massive transformations of life-worlds outside Euro America, the rapid unscrambling and repackaging of what we call “identity” . . . ’ (Bhatt 2008: 29). If Bhatt is right, then how do we proceed within a framework of multiculturalism or human rights that seems to presume specific kinds of subjects who are characterized as belonging to certain kinds of cultural identities – ethnic, religious, gendered, sexual, etc. Can we, however, think about what recognition might be in such a way that seriously takes into account the challenge to notions of the subject and identity proposed by Chetan Bhatt? We might try to answer this question by considering two paths marked out in these responses. The first belongs to Tariq Modood, who seeks to extend a doctrine of recognition for thinking about the possibilities of ‘coalitional possibilities