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Exotic and Benighted, or Modern yet Victimized? The Predicament of the Arab Queer
Abstract
Due to a number of discursive forces, the Arab queer has at the present moment become a flashpoint for Orientalizing discourses, a point at which multiple fields of Orientalizing discourse intersect. This Orientalizing discourse regarding the Arab queer centers around three poles that contradict each other and at the same time are all simultaneously in play in these Orientalist discourses surrounding the Arab queer. Those poles are these: the Arab queer as uniquely and exceedingly oppressed subject (as exemplified by Israeli pinkwashing efforts), the Arab queer as polymorphously perverse, and the Arab queer as hypersexual, inchoate savage. The discursive dynamics between these three poles will be explored through the lens of critical theory as informed by Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, among others. Additionally, this paper will show that it is not only the Arab queer that is marked by these colonialist tropes, but the Arab World as a whole that is reified as all of these things through the discursive processes of Orientalism. Furthermore, this paper will demonstrate the necessity, particularly in the field of Middle Eastern Studies, of expanding the application of the rubrics of queer theory to spaces outside of queerness, and in the end call for the Middle East scholar to not merely look at discursive space as always already divided into rigid zones of sexual desires and identities, but to look more closely at the role of sexuality in the construction of colonialism, Orientalism, and Western hegemony.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Mediterranean Countries
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries