In a short video posted on Facebook, the body moves of Nadia Gamal meet the voice of Madonna. What seals this fusion is a resemblance between the American pop singer's iconic cone-shaped brassiere and that of the Egyptian belly dancer. This video clip is part of an ongoing art project by Lebanese artist, Nasri Sayegh, to resurrect moments from old Egyptian films, mainly featuring belly dancers, and reconfigure them by adding different music, or creating loops, slow-motions and subtle rewinds. Sayegh describes his work as "an investigation, an attempt to recess, an 'encyclopedic embrace' that runs through the thread of Arab musical passion within the depths of the Arab night, the "Leyl", that is host to poetry, sensuality and melancholy."1 Using scholarly work on the seriality and inconclusiveness of essay films by Catherine Russell and Timothy Corrigan as well as queer film theory, such as Gayatri Gopniath's work on the circulation of desire and queer viewership of musical numbers in Bollywood films, I argue in my proposed paper that Sayegh's engagement with film archives of female bodies is contributing to the expansion of a distinctly Arab queer imaginary. By "awakening" these fragments of film, placing them in new cosmopolitan contexts and circulating them on social media, Sayegh produces new queer modes of appropriation of Arab culture. Adding a political dimension to this gesture of excavating the iconic figure of the belly dancer from the archive, Lebanese contemporary belly dancer, Alexander Paulikevich, is another artist whose work perpetuates belly dancing traditions in new queer forms. An openly-gay gender bender, Paulikevich, who actively participated in the past year's mass protests against the Lebanese government, became an unlikely poster child of the Lebanese revolution. A widely circulated drawing depicts him bare-chested in his signature vermilion tutu skirt. With an audacious dance pose, he faces the muzzle of a military tank. At the end of 2020, Paulikevich created a dance performance to comment on government's brutality against protesters adding to the queer imagining of the Lebanese revolution. Both these recent forms of engagement with belly-dancing, whether through film or in embodied performances, contribute to a growing body of art work that is casting a queer lens on Arab culture. 1 "Lam Adri Ma Tiba Al Inaq Ala Al Hawa / Fragments for an Arab melancholy." The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, accessed February 12, 20021, https://www.arabculturefund.org/Projects/24.