Towards an Alternative Framework: Gender, Sexuality, and Queerness in Contemporary Islamic Art
Panel VIII-07, 2020 Annual Meeting
On Thursday, October 8 at 01:30 pm
Panel Description
Much of the art historical discussion about gender and sexuality in contemporary Islamic art that has taken place throughout the U.S. and Europe over the past few decades has centered on opposing various governmental and socio-cultural regimes. Within Euro-American contexts, trends in exhibition and scholarship have focused on diaspora artists whose work challenges perceived repression based on gender and sexuality in the socio-political regimes of the Islamic world, largely embodied by imagery and critique of the veil, sex-segregation, and a homophobia that is presumed to be (uniquely) inherent to the region and religion. Alternatively, others have centered on artists, overwhelmingly women, whose work contests the Euro-American socio-cultural contexts from which these assumptions arise. Both of these instances construct a Euro-American framework as the starting point for considering and understanding gender and sexuality in the Islamic world and its diaspora, maintaining a Euro-American hegemony of conceptions of gender and sexuality that presumes it as universal. These approaches do not take into consideration the possibility, let alone the productivity, of notions of gender and sexuality rooted in the diversity of the Islamic world itself.
In seeking to challenge these limitations, the papers on this panel aim to increase our understanding of gender and sexuality in the Islamic world, through an analysis of contemporary Islamic art practices. This panel investigates the following questions: How do artists utilize canonical art historical styles in a way that challenges their original gendered and heterosexualized dynamics and instead creates a distinctly queer perspective? How do contemporary Islamic artistic practices utilize "deviant" sexualities as a means to confront existing political regimes? How can we bring queer studies scholarship to bear on a re-conceptualization of gender and sexuality in the Islamic world that acknowledges the influence of colonial histories and challenging the dichotomies between "East" and "West?" In addressing these questions, this panel aims to push the boundaries of discourses of gender and sexuality in Islamic art, expanding the fields of Art History, Gender/Sexuality Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies.
After the fall of the Ben Ali regime in 2011, Tunisians prepared to enter a new era of democracy. Yet, while several successive presidents have contributed to the gradual expansion of democracy in the country, state feminism and the colonial/modern sex/gender system reinforce the continued embeddedness of state authority within the fabric of state and social relations. In fact, state authority often works alongside proclamations of democracy in what Herbert Marcuse has called repressive tolerance. In Tunisia the authority of the state as a repressive monolith overrides democratic efforts in the new era, demonstrating that regime change alone cannot be held responsible for state or social change. Heather Love has argued that deviance is a “[challenge] to the stability and coherence of [the social world].” Deviance in sexual practices can therefore be read as a method of destabilization for normalcy. In this vein, subversive, deviant Tunisian art can challenge Tunisian authority. Young, queer, Tunisian Aïcha Snoussi’s artistic practice engages with questions of queer bodies and sex practices of deviance, pain, and pleasure. By deconstructing dichotomies such as human/animal, organic/inorganic, and male/female, Snoussi’s works poke holes in hierarchies of knowledge upon which state and social authorities are built. This paper finds affinities between sexual anomalies and deviance in Snoussi’s 2017 installation Le livre des anomalies, enabling the work to be to read as an archive of deviance that exposes how Tunisian state authority supersedes various governmental transitions.
For the MESA 2020 symposium panel, "Towards an Alternative Framework: Gender, Sexuality, and Queerness in Contemporary Islamic Art," I propose re-approaching interpretations of gender/sexuality in historic Islamic art. In this presentation I study the existing literature on Middle Eastern diasporic communities and bring queer identity into theoretical discussion with diaspora studies, creating a new framework for analysis. These ideas culminate in a consideration of works by Syrian-American visual artist, Jamil Hellu, who explores non-western ways of being queer that are informed by diaspora consciousness, a sociological and psychological component to diaspora studies. There is an incompatibility with how diasporic subjects are socialized to become queer subjects in the West and the conflicting, often contradictory, values and understandings of their own sexual desires from a cultural perspective. The artwork of Jamil Hellu provides significant examples of how local networks of identity are transmitted through visual language and how alternative sexuality scripts can be written.
I trace links between colonial discourses in pre-Modern Arab-Islamic regions and art by contemporary diasporic artists, challenging norms around gender/sexuality and their sustained colonial histories. Diasporic artists provide a rich platform to investigate the relationship of both colonial trauma and displacement within the queer Middle Eastern community, and how the conception of homeland complicates a transnational sexual identity. Studying the cultural production of the queer diaspora is fruitful in investigating the ways in which we can reach a narrative of Western and non-Western Modernity that works beyond the clichés of sexual oppression (Middle East) versus sexual acceptance (North America).
Salman Toor (Pakistan, b. 1983) is one of several emerging New York-based artists said to form New Queer Intimism, a movement that draws on the early twentieth-century practice of depicting domestic scenes that intimate social bonds, communal identity, and emotional states, but reconstitutes the prior tradition through representation of queer communities. Based upon his lived experiences in Brooklyn and Lahore, Toor’s paintings depict fictional scenes of domesticity and conviviality amongst young men and occasionally women in snug apartments, crowded bars, and bustling streets in both cities. Thematically, stylistically, and compositionally the paintings emulate the work of earlier Intimists as well as seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European portraitists, yet Toor populates his works with young, queer brown men. In some cases Toor even directly quotes canonical European paintings, such Édouard Manet’s "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" which serves as the source for his "The Bar on 13th Street," but here Toor replaces Manet’s main subjects, a bar maid and her white male client, with a young man with long braided hair, another young man as possible client, and a couple in embrace. By decentering the heterosexual couple, Toor recasts the dynamics of patron-client and the sexual connotations this carried in the original painting as a relationship of homosociality, equity, and intimacy amongst his subjects. This paper analyzes how Toor, in laying claim to multiple traditions and identities, uses a dual process of emulation and revision to challenge prior conceptions of beauty focused on whiteness by appropriating the very canon of its depiction and using it to new ends, while simultaneously eroding the dominant heterosexual desire of canonical European paintings by replacing their sexual object, the female model, with young men. In doing so, Toor creates a world of queer intimacy and community that radically reconceives not only the art historical canon, but also notions of beauty, sexual desire, and masculinity.
