While homosexuality and lesbianism remain proscribed identities and taboo topics of discussion in the Arab world today, new venues of expression, networking, and solidarity have emerged through the internet. Multiple progressive websites and electronic magazines are proliferating, allowing heretofore silenced members to assert an Arab gay identity, advertise Arab gay pride, promote reforms that would serve the interests of Arabs, and denounce persecution as well as prosecution (Ahbab; Gay Middle East, Habiba; Bintelnas; HeLeM; Aswat; Queer Jihad; al-Fatiha, Barra, Huriyah; etc.). One prominent concern voiced in these sites and in this emerging struggle for visibility is undoubtedly that of naming. How to call that which remains socially taboo and that which still carries the death penalty in some Arab countries (Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, UAE)? More often than not, the vocabulary adopted, proclaimed, and heralded as liberating echoes Western categories and sexual politics (the English words “gay” and “lesbian” are used even in the context of Arabic writing to give but one blatant example). In this presentation, after a brief review of the proliferation of newly coined Arabic words to speak about homosexuality, I will interrogate the facile imitation of Western labels in the process and question their usefulness in the context of Arab societies and cultures. I will also probe the oft-voiced intent by Arab gays and lesbians to coin a new terminology that would express positively and in Arabic the emotional or sexual relations between two people of the same gender. I will demonstrate that the assumptions that underlie the creation of new wordlists overlook and ultimately erase the very rich tradition on alternative sexual practices that has been prominent in the Islamicate world at least since the late tenth century. As I will show, gender bending has always been part and parcel both of the Arabic language and of Islamicate societies. Salvaging this tradition and its accompanying terminology on homosexuality challenges the claim that homosexuality is a Western importation, and renders the recourse to English categories superfluous. Moreover, uncovering the forgotten Arabic cultural material on alternative sexualities offers contemporary Arab gays and lesbians a rich and empowering indigenous heritage, as well as home-grown modes of resistance that are poised to challenge homophobic attitudes and policies in the Arab world, and the hegemony of Western sexual and cultural imperialism.

Muj?n (ribaldry), in both its heteroerotic and homoerotic dimensions, remained a legitimate mode of discourse, in prose or poetry, until the 19th century. One of its last expressions is probably Shidy?q’s Al-s?q ‘al? l-s?q (1855), remarkably in a purely heteroerotic declension. At the turn of the 20th century, not only will new editions of the classics of the Arabic literary lore be emptied of any material deemed unsuitable for a refined audience and for the new public created by the development of public education, but no modern ad?b would consider dealing with bodily functions, desire, sexualities and the transgressions of social and religious norms in the way pre-modern authors did. This marks the disappearance of the “space of transgression” allowed within the realm of classical adab. The vanishing of muj?n is not a mere consequence of Arabic literature’s confrontation with the Western model during the colonial age, or of the imposition of prudish norms seen as a token of modernity. The gradual relegation of the crudest forms of muj?n cannot be merely analyzed as a loss of freedom or a moral restriction imposed by modernity. It is precisely because of its outrageously misogynistic tone and its mainly homoerotic flavor that this part of Arabic literature becomes, during the 19th century, at odds with the evolution of societies which aim at redefining the role of women as essentialized abstract entities now defined as exclusive objects of male desire. When a strictly homosocial world opens itself to the mixing of genders in the public space, even if limited, the norms of literary production has to be modified. The ways in which literature, among other cultural productions, is consumed explains the new refusal of obscenity and this new awkwardness felt towards the excesses of the desiring body, for the written work now circulates freely, without the long education of textual consumption, formerly provided by the shaykh to his pupil. Paradoxically, the progress of women’s status and rights in Arab societies throughout the 19th and 20th centuries imposed new rules and conventions for literature. One century later, now that the heteronormalization of Arab societies has been gradually achieved, can muj?n reappear in new forms in Arabic literature, and can its homoerotic dimension be brought back to life? Various modern texts are examined to answer this question, including Salw? al-Na‘?m?’s Burh?n al-‘asal, Mu?ammad Shukri’s al-Shu???r, and ?amd? Ab? Gulayyil’s Lu??? mutaq?‘id?n. 

In “Out of the Closet: Representations of Homosexuals and Lesbians in Modern Arabic Literature,” Hanadi Al-Samman argues that “more attention must be given to the biological essence of sexual differentiation, to the body politics rather than gender politics, if the emergence of a recognized, outspoken Arab homosexual or lesbian identity is ever to be realized” in contemporary Arabic literature. While the emphasis on the body as a concrete, extra-linguistic reality is necessary as a counterweight to the normalizing thrust of social inscriptions, Al-Samman’s analysis overlooks the ways in which an essentialist approach to homosexuality can—and does—cater to the same homophobic impulse she attributes to “gender politics.” In this paper I will argue that the issue at stake in depictions of homosexuality in contemporary Arabic literature isn’t so much the dominance of a heteronormalizing constructivist approach over the more essentialist emphasis on the body, but rather an underlying investment in the definition of homosexuality as a means of containing its socially disruptive force—a project that is mobilized by the Arab absorption of sexuality as an especially significant category of identity through the colonial encounter with Western norms and the diffusion of these norms via globalization. Whether treating homosexuality as an innate, biological condition or a socially inculcated one, as a gender-transitive orientation or a gender-separatist one, as a local reality or a foreign import, contemporary Arab writers have consistently marked homosexuality as a minoritarian identity category that gains its significance in relation to a dominant, masculinist, heterosexual norm. While certain essentialist and constructivist elements have contributed in different ways to the dismantling of the heternormative stranglehold on sexuality, the net dominance of certain explanatory frameworks for homosexuality over others has meant that the ambiguity at the heart of gender and sexuality has been undermined in favor of epistemological closure and the policing function such closure entails. By examining a number of representative works that engage with homosexuality, and male homosexuality in particular—including Huda Barakat’s Hajar al-Dahik, Sa’d Allah Wannus’s Tuqus al-’Isharat wa al-Tahawwulat, and ‘Ala’ al-Aswani’s ‘Imarat Ya‘qubian—I will try to demonstrate that the need for epistemological closure on the question of homosexuality in contemporary Arabic literature comes in response to both “a crisis of Arab masculinity” and a crisis of cultural authenticity—both of which are framed by the repressive relations between Arab governments and their citizens and the continuing neo-colonial dominance of the West.

Recent debates on homoeroticism in contemporary Arabic literature and culture revolved around Joseph Massad’s premise of the inapplicability of the Western Gay International movement to an Arabic cultural context. Massad attributes the increase of homosexual literary representations to a misplaced, postcolonial desire on the part of the “colonized” Arab; mirroring what is in essence the desires of a “hegemonic” West. While one could argue the plausibility of this critical approach in a homosexual context, little is said about its appropriateness to female homoerotic literature that seems to fall outside the masculine West and the feminine East binary oppositions. In this paper, I argue that the recent critical homoerotic debates have focused on homosexuality as a representative model for gay subjecthood in the Arab world, and have thus failed to prove their applicability in establishing the parameters of a lesbian Arab identity. After surveying the Arabic literature produced in the last three decades and comparing it with its medieval counterpart, I argue that despite the increase of lesbian character depiction in recent literary texts; these representations offer little to advance societal views of female homoerotic desire which remains forever locked within traditional, heterocentric dialectic. Often writers evoke the topic of female homoeroticism through the portrayal of occasional, superficial scenes, without any attempt to delve into the essence of sexual identity differentiation. These passing allusions are often riddled with heterosexual moralistic righteousness, which claims that female homoeroticism exists only as a prelude to, or as a temporary replacement of, normative heterosexuality. Ilh?m Man?our’s recent novel She, You, and I (2000), however, is a pioneer in attempting to place the issue of lesbian sexuality at the forefront of Arab cultural awareness. Man?our’s lesbian heroine, Sih?m, grounds her sexual identity in feminine body politics rather than heterosexual or feminist politics. My research proves that one of the myriad impediments to a true literary representation of Arab female homoeroticism is the adherence to a politicized passive/active “femme/butch” formula that is clearly anchored in heterosexual and feminist politics rather than in lesbian body politics. For this reason, Man?our’s accomplishment lies in her assertion that her heroine’s choice of an alternative sexual identity is not motivated by political feminist discourse, but rather by her own body discourse. Her novel carves out alternative linguistic and cultural spaces, outside of the Western/Eastern dyad, for the expression of lesbian desire and the emergence of a recognized, outspoken Arab lesbian identity.

Recent debates about homosexuality in Arabic literature and culture have focused on the West’s role in shaping our perception of Arabic models of desire. Some critics have argued that Western sexuality marginalized and supplanted traditional Arabo-Islamic sexualities by casting them as uncivilized or anti-modern. This reading of the “hegemonic” West has produced in some instances a wholesale rejection of the effects and importance of Western discursive practices and theoretical models, from Westphal’s “homosexual” coined in 1870 to Eve Sedgwick’s “closet” and Judith Butler’s “gay rights as human rights.” In Joseph Massad’s work, for instance, this rejection takes the shape of a binary opposition pitting an authentic Arab desire against a hegemonic Western gay and lesbian model of sexual identity. In this theoretical paper, I summarize the various debates about the representations of homosexuality in Arabic literature and culture. I argue that it is crucial to rigorously engage Western theoretical practices in order to produce new knowledge about the transformations and mutations of Arab sexual identities and models of desire as they take shape in literature and film. I argue that there is a need for scholars working on Arab homosexuality to engage with the Arabic tradition but also with Queer Theory as an intellectual tradition that paved the way for thinking through gender and sexuality across cultural and historical settings, from Geoffrey Goldberg’s queering of the Renaissance to Johnathan Dollimore’s reading of André Gide, Oscar Wilde, and others. Furthermore, I argue that the readings of both past and present representations of Arab homosexuality are grounded not only in the theoretical frameworks from which those readings arise, i.e., American Academia, Queer Theory, and Postcolonial Theory, but also from contemporary Arab social settings and literary and artistic genres. The critical move to claim authentic Arab sexual practices and desires, and which overlooks current models of sexual identities visible in Arab societies and represented in literature and film, could only be characterized as ahistorical and nostalgic. In conclusion, I suggest that the resistance to Western theoretical frameworks and sexual models and the upholding of romanticized Arab sexual practices that lie outside of discourse produce a reductive binary opposition of East vs. West, thereby simplifying our understanding of an otherwise complex and multifaceted representation.