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Queer Affects
When we and several authors of the articles included here originally debated the idea of this special issue, our aim was to respond to what we perceived as a standstill that locks Middle Eastern queer studies into a premodern Eastern versus modern Western-oriented division. While the East is studied as a repository of tradition with an identifiable sexual and amorous nomenclature, the West is often presented as a fixed hegemonic structure distinct from the East, regardless of the long traditions of cultural exchange and the specific forms of translation and dialogue that take shape when the identities and models of desire associated with the West travel or are performed outside it or at its periphery. This division has generated a set of binaries pertaining to the applicability of terms (gay, lesbian, homosexual) and theoretical frameworks (queer theory) to Middle Eastern literary and cultural contexts. It is our belief that critical engagements with queer Arab and Iranian sexualities in literature and culture ought to situate current discussions in queer theory within debates and concerns arising from specific Middle Eastern social and political realities.
Focusing on modern literature and culture, this issue examines queer Middle Eastern models of identification and desire by activating dynamic and comparative readings in between and beyond East and West, classical and modern, and the literary and the political. A productive understanding of the transformation and fluctuation of the discourses on sexuality in Middle Eastern cultural production requires lateral readings that are etymological and political, comparative and interdisciplinary. This issue addresses the multiplicity of layers, discourses, and cultural models within a diverse landscape where identities are not fixed or neatly associated with particular ideological models or traditional practices, but are often in a state of tension and uneasiness. The issue presents studies that move the discussion from the politics of representation and the reading of queer Middle Eastern sexuality as exclusively symptomatic of imperialist and colonial agendas toward engagements with it as a complex site of meaning and transformation. The aim of our intervention is to identify multiple sites of coding and recoding in order to investigate queerness in moments of play, performance, contradiction, dissonance, and evanescence.
In line with recent scholarship by Afasaneh...