One year after former-president Mohammed Morsi was elected, thousands of Egyptians called for his ousting on June 30th, 2013. Meanwhile, Morsi supporters congregated at Rab’a al-Adawiyya and al-Nahda Square; they continued their protest weeks after Morsi was removed from office. On August 14th, 2013, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s current president, violently dispersed their encampment, marking the bloodiest day in Egypt’s modern history. Building upon Jacque Rancière's theoretical work on politics and aesthetics, this paper focuses on the “iconographic battle” surrounding the Rab’a logo (a stark black hand displaying four fingers). I examine visual responses by supporters of the Rab’a protest, and those who opposed it, to reconstitute the narratives surrounding the massacre. Specifically, I ask: how do images reify political sensibilities that reflect existing social realities? I discuss how our knowledge of this violent event can be understood by its multiple representations. By analyzing several images, a music video, and a short film, I argue that these expressive cultural practices mirror traveling discourses and act as political agents that “redistribute[s] the sensible.”

The changing face of the Palestinian landscape has consistently been critiqued in terms of the expansion of Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank, the scarring of the land in the building of Jewish-only roads and the apartheid wall, and the smattering of permanent and floating checkpoints regulating movement between previously fluid spaces. This has been true not only in the political sphere, but also in art produced in Palestine. However, in the post-Second Intifada period, some Palestinian artists have turned their critical eye towards changes inflicted from within the Palestinian communities themselves. Inass Yassin’s Cinema Waleed project examines the transformation of one of the three movie theaters that used to be in Ramallah by the owner of a store that sells knickknacks to tourists. The former cinema was converted from a historic cultural site into a mall catering to a conservative Muslim clientele. The series of works which make up Yassin’s project investigate both the transformation of this space (and those like it) in the name of capitalism and into places of capitalistic purchasing power, as well as the shifting of the cultural scene in Ramallah from a Christian city to one of increasing Muslim conservativism. This paper argues that disillusionment from the failure of Oslo in the post-Second Intifada period has led artists to shift the focus of their critique from that of the Occupation to one that is more self-reflexive—looking inward at Palestinian politics and society. I analyze how Inass Yassin’s Cinema Waleed project reflects increasing concerns among Palestinians living in cities such as Ramallah about the loss of cultural and traditional spaces not at the hands of Israelis, but at the hands of Palestinian capitalism and industrialization, as well as an increasing conservatism in Palestinian culture.

Chouf Minorities is a Tunisian organization that prioritizes women’s bodily sovereignty and sexualities, particularly lesbian, bisexual, and queer, through art, media, and technology. Since 2015 Chouf has coordinated an annual international feminist art festival, Chouftouhonna, which highlights women’s critical cultural dialogue. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, “a sort of mixed, joint experience,” that is “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (1984), this presentation investigates how Chouftouhonna functions as feminist space where the queer imaginary is made possible. The conceptual space resists dominant narratives of social reality such as the rigidity of the Tunisian social-sexual hierarchy, thereby constituting the festival through heterotopia, where the state and gender violence of modern Tunisia are temporarily suspended. Chouftouhonna and Chouf use feminism as a vehicle with which to visualize the queer imaginary through cultural practice. Due to reforms of the country’s first post-independence president, Habib Bourguiba, women in Tunisia have the right to access birth control and abortion, and to initiate divorce. However, the majority of governmental policies and provisions for women merely reinforce the state-serving model of femininity that Bourguiba originally set forth as a modernization project. Further, Article 230 of the Tunisian Penal Code outlaws homosexuality for both men and women. Much feminist and queer work therefore remains to be done in Tunisia. In 2015, Chouf Minorities hosted the first iteration of the Chouftouhonna festival in Tunis. In September 2017, the now annual festival will be held for the third time. By using multimedia and audiovisual approaches, the festival becomes a “material possibilit(y) of subversion” (Brown, 2007). It creates space where, through making and sharing art and performance, queer and feminist Tunisians can experience non-hierarchical community organization. Without the restrictions created by the overlapping structures of the Tunisian state and social-sexual hierarchy, an affirmation of various sexual and social practices is possible.

Part of a larger work dealing with local queer aesthetics in Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia, this paper focuses on visual and performance artist Nilbar Güre?’s work and analyzes the ways in which her photography deconstructs and re-imagines the various identity markers of the Turkish nation, and western discourses of homosexuality at once. By depicting seemingly conventional women in traditional settings (such as the living room, the mosque, the home) and imbuing them with a queer currency of desire, Güre? calls into question the stability of both national and cultural narratives regarding these women’s lives, and the stereotypes of an increasingly globalizing queer culture. Thus, her work speaks both to the socio-political constructs of the nation, and to the broader discourses of queer studies and theory at large. Güre?’s images, set either in the domestic sphere governed by cultural norms, or in public places such as the street or the mosque, where women interact with these highly regimented spaces in unexpected ways, offer a commentary on the way Turkish nation and culture police women’s bodies and their sexuality. In this paper, I offer close readings of a number of her works (Ayshe Loves Fatma, Worship, A Promise, Demand More! to name a few) and argue that the narratives created by the artist in these photographs form a visual archive of local queer aesthetics that positions itself in opposition to both national discourses on women’s sexuality, and western-centric discourses on homosexuality.