Re-Orienting Desire from With/In Queer Arab Shame: Conceptualizing Queer Arab Subjectivities through Sexual Difference Theory in a Reading of Bareed Mista3jil

Abstract

This paper, whose title alludes to Joseph Massad’s article ‘Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World’ (2002) aims at critically discussing his ideas. To do so, I mobilize Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray’s theorizations of sexual difference. Their understandings of becoming-subject will be put in conversation with a close reading of shame in Bareed Mista3ji: True Stories, as guided by Dina Georgis’ analysis, in order to engage with the hybrid and affective articulations of Arab (homo)sexualities.