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Introduction: Curiosities of Middle East Studies in Queer Times

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2013

Paul Amar  and
Omnia El Shakry
Paul Amar
Affiliation:
Global & International Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, Calif.; e-mail: [email protected]; and Department of History, University of California, Davis, Calif.; e-mail: [email protected]
Omnia El Shakry
Affiliation:
Global & International Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, Calif.; e-mail: [email protected]; and Department of History, University of California, Davis, Calif.; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

Starting in 2010, movements of transformation, spaces of sociability, relations of power, and economies of affect in the Middle East plunged into a time of radical dislocation. Fearless, dissident solidarities challenged patterns of identity, normativity, and authority that had constituted the region for more than a generation. One epoch ended, in which struggles over power seemed all too often restricted to constrained contests between nongovernmental organizations, religious dissidents, and security-state repressors. In their place new insurgencies came to question the narratives, binaries, and regimes of feeling pinned to “identity politics” as defined by categories of class, gender, sexuality, and religion. Curious forms of revolutionary social uprising exploded among gender, labor, and community dissidents at street level, generating novel popular cultures, rebel counterpublics, and carnivals of new-media experimentation.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 45 , Special Issue 2: Queer Affects , May 2013 , pp. 331 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

NOTES

1 Duggan, Lisa, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Castronovo, Russ and Nelson, Dana (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002): 175–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Puar, Jasbir K. and Rai, Amit, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots,” Social Text 20 (2002): 117–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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3 Foucault, Michel, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); idem, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador 2008)Google Scholar.

4 Mbembe, Achille, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (2003): 11–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Puar, Jasbir, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar; idem, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993).

6 Halberstam, Judith, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

7 Especially for those for whom the queer art of failure does not abide by the standards of normal success and productivity, see Halberstam, Judith, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press Books, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See “A New Queer Agenda,” The Scholar and the Feminist Online, 10, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2011/Spring 2012). http://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/.

9 See the special issues “Middle East Sexualities,” in Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 7, no. 3 (2011), ed. Deeb, Lara and Al-Kassim, Dina; “Queering Middle Eastern Cyberscapes,” in Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 8, no. 3 (2012)Google Scholar, ed. Kuntsman, Adi and Al-Qasimi, Noor; and “Lesbians, Sexuality and Islam,” in Journal of Lesbian Studies 16, no. 4 (2012)Google Scholar, ed. Huma Ahmed-Ghosh. See also Amar, Paul, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Turning the Gendered Politics of the Security State Inside Out? Charging the Police with Sexual Harassment in Egypt,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 13 (2011): 299–328; and Jacob, Wilson, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.