Queer Studies and Queer Politics: Reflections and Research from the Middle East

This interdisciplinary panel will bring together three groundbreaking scholars working on Queer studies in Southwest Asia (Middle East)

Abdulhamit Arvas, Assistant Professor, English,  University of Pennsylvania

Arvas’s book in-progress, Abducted Boys: The Homoerotics of Race and Empire in Early Modernity, explores racial and imperial entanglements of homoeroticism and violence in English and Ottoman contexts with a focus on abductions and conversions in the early modern Mediterranean. He will discuss the significance of queer early modern Ottomans in exploring the history of sexuality in a transcultural context.

Maya Mikdashi,  Associate Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies,  Rutgers University

Mikdashi’s book, Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism and the State in Lebanon (SUP, 2022), theorizes the relationships between sexual difference and political difference, the religious and the secular, and law, bureaucracy, and biopower. She will focus on the regulation of queer and straight sexualities in the transnational Middle East through moral panics, law, bureaucracy, and violence, focusing on Lebanon. 

Evren Savcı, Assistant Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University

Savcı’s book, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (DUP, 2021), analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey’s AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. She will speak to the ways in which the history of sexuality and modernity has influenced queer studies’ work on the Middle East. 

The discussion will be moderated by Lucinda Ramberg, Anthropology, Cornell University.

Register for the session here.