Abstract
In 1974, Italian leftist intellectual, poet and filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini visited Beirut. He screened his films, Medea, Porcile and Oedipus Rey, known for their critical stance towards patriarchy and capitalism. The screenings were held at Dar al-Fan, House of the Arts, a leading cultural space that no longer exists. In 1975, Pasolini was brutally assassinated near Rome. Some believed his homosexuality was the cause of his killing at the hands of a young male hustler. Others evoked his radical anti-capitalist views as the reason behind his assassination. Curiously, that same year, Beirut witnessed the eruption of a long-drawn-out civil war. An odd osmosis of tragic destinies linked the Marxist, queer poet to the bustling city, a laboratory, at the time, for socially and intellectually progressive ideologies.
This paper departs from Pasolini's visit to Beirut (based on letters preserved at his personal archive in Florence and Lebanese newspaper clippings) to ponder the state of queerness in the Middle East today and the relation between LGBT rights and neo-liberal realities. Inspired by Ann Cvetkovich's writing on the affective dimension of archives and Maya Mikdashi's elaboration of a fictional Arab queer historical figure, I develop an imagined itinerary of Pasolini in present-day Beirut to offer a poetic, queer space for speculation over the future of the region where the sexual, the political and the mystical overlap. In an interview with a local newspaper in Beirut, Pasolini said that, "dreaming is a form of religiosity," recognizing the need to think and dream the future, otherwise. This quote is more apropos today than ever at a time when not only personal aspirations of freedom of sexuality seem elusive but also collective hopes seem trampled by continuous wars and crippling neo-liberal policies.
Using insights from queer theory, as elaborated by José Esteban Muñoz, Sara Ahmed and Jack Halberstam in an attempt to think queerness against neo-liberal ideologies, the paper explores new academic and artistic practices involving the archives to reclaim forgotten, marginal and untold queer histories but also provide speculative futures in the current quagmire facing the region.
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