Between Banat

Author: Mejdulene Bernard Shomali
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478023902
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Book Description
In Between Banat Mejdulene Bernard Shomali examines homoeroticism and nonnormative sexualities between Arab women in transnational Arab literature, art, and film. Moving from The Thousand and One Nights and the Golden Era of Egyptian cinema to contemporary novels, autobiographical writing, and prints and graphic novels that imagine queer Arab futures, Shomali uses what she calls queer Arab critique to locate queer desire amid heteronormative imperatives. Showing how systems of heteropatriarchy and Arab nationalisms foreclose queer Arab women’s futures, she draws on the transliterated term “banat”—the Arabic word for girls—to refer to women, femmes, and nonbinary people who disrupt stereotypical and Orientalist representations of the “Arab woman.” By attending to Arab women’s narration of desire and identity, queer Arab critique substantiates queer Arab histories while challenging Orientalist and Arab national paradigms that erase queer subjects. In this way, Shomali frames queerness and Arabness as relational and transnational subject formations and contends that prioritizing transnational collectivity over politics of authenticity, respectability, and inclusion can help lead toward queer freedom.

This Arab Is Queer

Author: Elias Jahshan
Publisher: Saqi Books
ISBN: 0863569757
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
'Profoundly moving and uplifting'--Rabih Alameddine This ground-breaking anthology features the compelling and courageous memoirs of eighteen queer Arab writers – some internationally bestselling, others using pseudonyms. Here, we find heart-warming connections and moments of celebration alongside essays exploring the challenges of being LGBTQ+ and Arab. From a military base in the Gulf to loving whispers caught between the bedsheets; and from touring overseas as a drag queen to a concert in Cairo where the rainbow flag was raised to a crowd of thousands, this collection celebrates the true colours of a vibrant Arab queer experience. 'A vital addition to what it means to be Arab. We can sometimes lose sight of the fact, in the Arab world, that what we want are spaces of freedom and tolerance, dignity, equality, and, above all, of love. Let this anthology serve as a beautiful reminder of that.'-- Layla AlAmmar 'Visionary. A powerful and moving portrait of life as a queer Arab.'-- Sabrina Mahfouz 'A heartfelt, moving collection, unflinching in its vulnerability, courageous and empowering in its honesty. These writers hold our gaze, demanding to be seen, on their own terms.'-- Yassmin Abdel-Magied

Queer Arab Martyr

Author: Jad Jaber
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781940813370
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
Queer Arab Martyr explores the violence, secrets and fetishes unique to the Arab world unveiling the intersectionality of identity politics, religion and ethnicity. The book collects short emotional ethnographies to describe the sexualities, body politics, and the subculture of queer sexual minorities in the Arab world.

Guapa

Author: Saleem Haddad
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590517709
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
A debut novel that tells the story of Rasa, a young gay man coming of age in the Middle East Set over the course of twenty-four hours, Guapa follows Rasa, a gay man living in an unnamed Arab country, as he tries to carve out a life for himself in the midst of political and social upheaval. Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. One night Rasa's grandmother — the woman who raised him — catches them in bed together. The following day Rasa is consumed by the search for his best friend Maj, a fiery activist and drag queen star of the underground bar, Guapa, who has been arrested by the police. Ashamed to go home and face his grandmother, and reeling from the potential loss of the three most important people in his life, Rasa roams the city’s slums and prisons, the lavish weddings of the country’s elite, and the bars where outcasts and intellectuals drink to a long-lost revolution. Each new encounter leads him closer to confronting his own identity, as he revisits his childhood and probes the secrets that haunt his family. As Rasa confronts the simultaneous collapse of political hope and his closest personal relationships, he is forced to discover the roots of his alienation and try to re-emerge into a society that may never accept him.

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique

Author: Sa'ed Atshan
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503612406
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
From Ramallah to New York, Tel Aviv to Porto Alegre, people around the world celebrate a formidable, transnational Palestinian LGBTQ social movement. Solidarity with Palestinians has become a salient domain of global queer politics. Yet LGBTQ Palestinians, even as they fight patriarchy and imperialism, are themselves subjected to an "empire of critique" from Israeli and Palestinian institutions, Western academics, journalists and filmmakers, and even fellow activists. Such global criticism has limited growth and led to an emphasis within the movement on anti-imperialism over the struggle against homophobia. With this book, Sa'ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestinian spirit of agency, defiance, and creativity, in the face of daunting pressures and forces working to constrict it. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique explores the necessity of connecting the struggles for Palestinian freedom with the struggle against homophobia.

Desiring Arabs

Author: Joseph A. Massad
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226509605
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 469

Book Description
Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, in Desiring Arabs Joseph A. Massad reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural heritage and civilization. A work of impressive scope and erudition, Massad’s chronicle of both the history and modern permutations of the debate over representations of sexual desires and practices in the Arab world is a crucial addition to our understanding of a frequently oversimplified and vilified culture. “A pioneering work on a very timely yet frustratingly neglected topic. . . . I know of no other study that can even begin to compare with the detail and scope of [this] work.”—Khaled El-Rouayheb, Middle East Report “In Desiring Arabs, [Edward] Said’s disciple Joseph A. Massad corroborates his mentor’s thesis that orientalist writing was racist and dehumanizing. . . . [Massad] brilliantly goes on to trace the legacy of this racist, internalized, orientalist discourse up to the present.”—Financial Times

A Tale of Two Omars

Author: Omar Sharif
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640095586
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
"A powerful and essential memoir of self-discovery . . . Brimming with beautiful remembrances of his grandfather and terrifying stories of abuse and homophobia, this is an essential book that shines a much-needed light on the intersection of Arab and queer identity." —Abdi Nazemian, Lambda Literary Award–winning author of Like a Love Story, a Stonewall Honor Book The grandson of Hollywood royalty on his father’s side and Holocaust survivors on his mother’s, Omar Sharif Jr. learned early on how to move between worlds, from the Montreal suburbs to the glamorous orbit of his grandparents’ Cairo. His famous name always protected him wherever he went. When, in the wake of the Arab Spring, he made the difficult decision to come out in the pages of The Advocate, he knew his life would forever change. What he didn’t expect was the backlash that followed. From bullying, to illness, attempted suicide, becoming a victim of sex trafficking, death threats by the thousands, revolution and never being able to return to a country he once called home, Omar Sharif Jr. has overcome more challenges than one might imagine. Drawing on the lessons he learned from both sides of his family, A Tale of Two Omars charts the course of an iconoclastic life, revealing in the process the struggles and successes that attend a public journey of self-acceptance and a life dedicated in service to others.

Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800

Author: Khaled El-Rouayheb
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226729907
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Book Description
Attitudes toward homosexuality in the pre-modern Arab-Islamic world are commonly depicted as schizophrenic—visible and tolerated on one hand, prohibited by Islam on the other. Khaled El-Rouayheb argues that this apparent paradox is based on the anachronistic assumption that homosexuality is a timeless, self-evident fact to which a particular culture reacts with some degree of tolerance or intolerance. Drawing on poetry, biographical literature, medicine, dream interpretation, and Islamic texts, he shows that the culture of the period lacked the concept of homosexuality.

Queer in Translation

Author: Evren Savci
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012854
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Book Description
In Queer in Translation, Evren Savcı analyzes the travel and translation of Western LGBT political terminology to Turkey in order to illuminate how sexual politics have unfolded under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP government. Under the AKP's neoliberal Islamic regime, Savcı shows, there has been a stark shift from a politics of multicultural inclusion to one of securitized authoritarianism. Drawing from ethnographic work with queer activist groups to understand how discourses of sexuality travel and are taken up in political discourse, Savcı traces the intersection of queerness, Islam, and neoliberal governance within new and complex regimes of morality. Savcı turns to translation as a queer methodology to think Islam and neoliberalism together and to evade the limiting binaries of traditional/modern, authentic/colonial, global/local, and East/West—thereby opening up ways of understanding the social movements and political discourse that coalesce around sexual liberation in ways that do justice to the complexities both of what circulates under the signifier Islam and of sexual political movements in Muslim-majority countries.

An Arab Melancholia

Author: Abdellah Taïa
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 158435111X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
An autobiographical portrait of a gay Arab man, living between cultures, seeking an identity through love and writing. I had to rediscover who I was. And that's why I left the apartment.... And there I was, right in the heart of the Arab world, a world that never tired of making the same mistakes over and over.... I had no more leniency when it came to the Arab world... None for the Arabs and none for myself. I suddenly saw things with merciless lucidity.... —An Arab Melancholia Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he's out of breath. He's running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He's running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who's out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood—which is a place the teenager both loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco. Irresistibly charming, angry, and wry, this autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Abdellah Taïa's identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures. The book spans twenty years, moving from Salé, to Paris, to Cairo. Part incantation, part polemic, and part love letter, this extraordinary novel creates a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery.