Starting in 2010, movements of transformation, spaces of sociability, relations of power, and economies of affect in the Middle East plunged into a time of radical dislocation. Fearless, dissident solidarities challenged patterns of identity, normativity, and authority that had constituted the region for more than a generation. One epoch ended, in which struggles over power seemed all too often restricted to constrained contests between nongovernmental organizations, religious dissidents, and security-state repressors. In their place new insurgencies came to question the narratives, binaries, and regimes of feeling pinned to “identity politics” as defined by categories of class, gender, sexuality, and religion. Curious forms of revolutionary social uprising exploded among gender, labor, and community dissidents at street level, generating novel popular cultures, rebel counterpublics, and carnivals of new-media experimentation.

At the same time, interdisciplinary fields in the academy had been facing escalating forces of political appropriation and fiscal austerity, whose lines of struggle followed parallel tracks. Middle East studies, which since the 1980s had fought to disassociate itself from Orientalism, became targeted by a wave of attempts to purge the field of critical politics. The nascent field of queer studies found itself facing pressures to be appropriated by a global LGBT movement that was fast moving into the mainstream, assimilated into a new “civilizing mission” through its embrace of pro-marriage and pro-military politics.Footnote ¹ On another front, queer studies found itself squeezed out of departments and jobs by a resurgent field of women's studies that seemed repelled by the complexities and dilemmas of sexuality studies. But these queer times of crisis also present themselves as times for curious opportunities.

“Queer,” “curious,” and “query” all come from the same root in Indo-European languages; but the spirit of radical questioning and the confrontation of curious conjunctures of power cannot be dismissed as merely a European or Enlightenment project of domination. To the contrary, in this roundtable discussion a group of thoughtful scholars demonstrates that a theoretically innovative wing of Middle East studies has special insights and unique capacities for making meaning out of these queer times.

The authors in this roundtable were brought together in order to focus on how queer theory, one of the most innovative and dynamic fields in the academy today, and Middle East studies might be productively thought through together. We should avert, at the outset, the notion that queer theory is synonymous with, or the newest incarnation of, gay and lesbian studies, or that it focuses exclusively on homosexuality, or that it might be of interest only to those concerned with sexual identity-politics. Queer theory, much like postcolonial and other forms of critical theory, as Dina Al-Kassim notes in her roundtable contribution, is a “practice of critical unraveling that extends . . . to questions of embodiment and desire.” Queer theory, as both an analytical framework and a methodology, invites us to explore how power crosscuts our understanding of sexuality and the norm, while remaining particularly attuned to how non-heteronormative practices, desires, and categories of sex and gender are rendered intelligible in historical and contemporary contexts. It focuses, therefore, on interrogating and transforming the very conceptual categories that we use, centering on rethinking distinctions between the normative and the non-normative, and the normal and the pathological. Queer theory is eminently capacious in its conceptual reach, as indicated by the diversity of the pieces assembled here, which touch on psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies as critical reading practices; the geography of modernity, masculinity, and class formation; sectarianization and citizenship; biopolitics, governmentality, and diasporic trans subjects; and homonationalism and pinkwashing.

Here we identify roughly three sets of methodologies relevant to thinking queer theory in relation to Middle East studies. One approach is articulated with rhetorical force by Joseph Massad, whose Desiring Arabs forms a critical backdrop for the roundtable.Footnote ² As Massad himself insists, he is not a queer theorist. Rather, he offers a trenchant critique of the global circulation of LGBT identities, tracing their exportation from the colonial West as a form of cultural imperialism. In his reading, the imposition, essentialization, and local appropriation of the homo-heterosexuality binary is attendant with the universalization of a human-rights-based discourse that links sexual rights to civilizational worth. Massad's delineation of a universalizing neoimperialism that penetrates societies through both material and affective processes provides us with a critical tool for confronting processes of assimilationism and reactionary appropriations.

Another group of scholars, some gathered here, maintain the critical thrust of Massad, targeting the imperial power of Western-affiliated norms and categories, particularly as they inform “gay and lesbian” identities, economies, and spaces. However, in the work of Jasbir Puar and Sima Shakhsari, queer resistance and sexual counterpublics are imaginable in the Middle East. Questions of categorization and “identity” do not overdetermine questions of power or sociality. Puar's roundtable contribution offers a grounded critique of homonationalism (gay identity politics’ embrace of patriotic, pro-military nationalism as a vehicle for emancipation) and pinkwashing (the marketing of pro-Zionist politics and the justification of Arab dispossession through the promotion of Israel as a gay utopia), while Shakhsari looks at anti-Iran geopolitics that harness human-rights organizations’ depictions of victimized transgender individuals to strategic efforts to contain or overthrow the Islamic Republic. These scholars work in solidarity with queer-identified activists and trans migrants within the region. Their work, therefore, provides a critical vocabulary for exposing and resisting militarized normativities and legal and political regimes that institute “sexualities” not as fields of embodiment or sociability, but rather as repressive regimes of necropolitics. Biopolitics, as conceived by Foucault, constitutes power formations that, through disciplines of knowledge, statistics, mental and physiological health, policing and punishment, and population management, stimulate health and well-being, social orderings, sexual formations, and economic productivities.Footnote ³ Necropolitics, on the other hand, as conceived by Mbembe and by Puar,Footnote ⁴ produces long-term degradation, racialized subordination, eroticized dehumanization, and, in the end, more suffering, war, and death. Queer subjects reveal the limits and intersections of both regimes, as Shakhsari states in this roundtable: “Shuttling between life and death, the transgender refugee is caught between biopolitics and necropolitics, where her body is produced and managed through religious, medical, psychological, and geopolitical discourses, and her death is sanctioned in the state of exception as a refugee . . . and as transgender.” Thus Puar's and Shakhsari's essays underline how these two formations of modernity operate together, dialectically through a politics of sexuality, but also in ways that generate contradictions and ruptures through which resistance erupts.

A third group of scholars, represented here by Dina Al-Kassim, Wilson Jacob, and Maya Mikdashi, offer close interpretations of the transdisciplinary reading practices and imaginaries offered by Middle East studies, finding stubbornly queer practices at the core of the field's historical optic. As a critical theoretical posture, “queerness,” they note, invokes the indeterminacy and dubiety, rather than the foundational stability, of a range of categories, including identity and locality. In so doing, they foreground the structurally homologous location of queer theory and Middle East studies as interdisciplinary formations forged in the interstices of hegemonic disciplines, most notably through postcolonial theory. Al-Kassim thus locates what we might term the shared theoretical unconscious of queer theory and critical Middle East studies, as inaugurated by Edward Said, as the inheritors of a “postcolonial antifoundational critique.” Jacob, revisiting the intellectual heritage of Middle East studies in relation to the queering of epistemologies, notes that his own discipline of history has grappled with pinpointing the time-space of modernity, while often falling back on center–periphery models that conceptualize modernity as a process emanating from the West and replicated or multiplied elsewhere. In contrast to this model of civilizational binaries (the West and the non-West), he puts forth the notion that Middle East studies always already has queer potential insofar as its “intersectionality” (between and beyond binaries of East/West, local/global) exerts pressure on the dominant discourse of history. Mikdashi further extends this transdiciplinarity by placing citizenship studies and queer theory in conversation, through a provocative juxtaposition of what she terms strategic religious conversion by Lebanese citizens and the recent court case of a transsexual litigant. “Queering sectarianism,” Mikdashi argues, is a set of subversive and strategic practices, deeply embedded in what are oftentimes contradictory desires that transgress categories most subversively when linked, paradoxically, to normative romantic attachments of marriages and families.

The significance of theory to queer theory does not go unremarked in our roundtable. Authors invoke a theoretical lexicon that includes, but is not limited to, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe, theorists who have in one way or another complicated our understanding of the subject. The subject, decentered as a sovereign, self-constituted agent grounded in consciousness, is now understood as enmeshed within discursive formations and biopolitical regimes. Queer theorists, including Judith Butler, whose work on gender performativity provided a generative site of debate and theoretical innovation,Footnote ⁵ and J. Jack Halberstam, whose notion of “queer time” breaks with normative temporalities and spacesFootnote ⁶ and reasserts the anarchic potential of transgressive embodiments and desires,Footnote ⁷ have built upon these poststructuralist insights to imagine what a queering of the subject might look like. And politically engaged queer theorists, linked to the Occupy movement in the United States and often writing in explicit solidarity with movements in the Middle East, launched an online hub in 2012 that marked the emergence of a new radical transnational and transdisciplinary project and front for political engagement.Footnote ⁸ As Wilson Jacob points out, meditations on the subject and on subjectivity within Middle East studies have tended to remain the purview of literary scholars, as indicated by their prevalence in the articles of this IJMES special issue. Within these queer times, however, there has been a resurgence of critical social scientific production, geopolitical analysis, and social-history work from queer perspectives in Middle East studies that has been complementing and engaging literary perspectives.Footnote ⁹

Queer readings do not aim simply to locate homosexual or queer subjects where there were presumed to be none, but rather to trace “the spectral effect of alterity,” as Al-Kassim puts it in her contribution, within texts, practices, and histories. Thus Michael Allan's article in this issue locates the structural analogies between the terrorist and the homosexual in ‘Imarat Yaʿqubyan; Haytham Bahoora, in his article, locates Husayn Mardan's poetry and its celebration of the transgressive power of pleasure as a critique of the high modernism of postwar Iraq and the teleological pretensions of state power; and Jacob's roundtable essay locates the khawwal and futuwwa as the doppelgangers of effendi masculinity in interwar Egypt. These “queer couplings” of dissident and nonheteronormative subjects, to borrow Michael Allan's turn of phrase, enable the imagination of a queer politics drawn outside of identity claims.

In this light, the Middle East scholars gathered here do not utilize queer studies as an alien theory imported to “native data” (to quote Al-Kassim), but see the gender troubles, sectarian subversions, social movements, and affective economies of the Middle East—as well as the forms of geopolitical, colonial, liberal, and cultural domination that occupy the region—as generative of theory itself.