Trauma, Recovery, and Self-Discovery in the Arabophone Queer Bildungsroman

This article examines Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Nabī’s Fī ghurfat al-ʿankabūt (2016) as a queer and contemporary reconfiguration of the Bildungsroman , a constitutive genre in the Arabophone literary panorama. The novel narrates trauma, recovery, and self-discovery in contemporary Egypt, setting the plot against the historical backdrop of the 2001 “Queen Boat Affair,” the mass detention of 57 men that occurred in 2001 on and near a Nile disco boat. In particular, the novel follows Hānī, a gay man whose imprisonment for suspected homosexuality becomes the catalyst for a non-linear process of self-reconstruction. The narrative intertwines “personal growth” narratives with a “crisis plot” and combines autobiographical confession, fragmented temporality, and multiple developmental trajectories. Through textual analysis and references to the scholarship on Global queer narratives, I will show how Hānī negotiates the loss of voice caused by state violence and articulates a plural, performative subjectivity that resists binary models of identity through the practice of memoir writing. By foregrounding the body, life writing, and the politics of visibility in his previous life as a non-binary subject, the novel positions queer experience at the center of the process of individual (re)construction after trauma. Reappropriating and rewriting what has been defined as a historically “normative genre” by literary critics, ʿAbd al-Nabī situates Fī ghurfat al-ʿankabūt at the intersection between the Egyptian novelistic canon and the global queer Bildungsroman , asserting the legitimacy of queer subject formation within a national literary tradition

Foregrounding · Life writing · Memoir · Narrative · Performative utterance · Queer · Queer theory · Racialization · Subject (documents) · Subjectivity · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Middle East Politics and Society