Queer Arab Sexualities and the Grind against Heteronormativity

Mejdulene Shomali's Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives is a book that I, and undoubtedly many others, have been waiting for. Not many books exist on queer Arab sexualities, and very few take up women exclusively. The books that do exist either focus on a particular historical period, have a religious emphasis in Islamic texts, or examine a particular nation such as Lebanon or the Maghreb. Between Banat exhumes Arab women's sexualities from obfuscation by constructing an affective archive of feminine queerness read through multiple genealogies and conceptual strategies. In her survey of the aesthetic archive, from Golden Era Egyptian films to contemporary publications and everything in between, Shomali elegantly puts forward a conceptual framework to uncover love and desire among women living under historically defined and ideological conditions. Indeed, her method of analysis is striking in its capacity to exhume queer traces and affective ruptures from historic erasure and does so with great care and loving attention to the subjects.Shomali's well-researched book cuts across historical periods, nations, and religions and gleans its archive from a diverse set of cultural sites to represent same-sex female sexuality. The conversation takes place at the crossroads of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, critical race theory, diaspora studies, and Arab American studies, and it coalesces around the question of how to think Arabness and how the entanglements of colonial legacies in the region and in the diaspora have impacted and shaped queer Arab women's sexualities. There is so much to praise about this book, but what I most appreciate is its commitment to world building from an obscured history of queerness. Shomali indeed resists the temptation of telling an origin story and instead points to the prevalence of ambivalence and incoherence. What is consistent in this gestural and material archive is the desire for an unnamed otherwise from its subjects expressed through the affects of defiance of gender norms and sexual respectability. In other words, what defines this archive is the rejection of heteronormativity.Between Banat makes a significant contribution in carving out radical ways of understanding queer subversion in women. Shomali's use of the word queer is meant to register not identity but instead acts of subversion. Similarly, she does not deploy the category "women" naively; indeed, some of the subjects that appear in this archive are not legible as proper normative women. By invoking the titular banat (Arabic word for girls), the category of woman is troubled. Arguably, banat is a more playful representation of women. It's perhaps comparable to femme, a Western identity formation that emerged post–World War II and was popularized in the 1990s, signifying a queer or non-normative femininity. Like femme, banat as Shomali treats it celebrates brazen feminine expression and offers an apt way to represent the spectrum of subjects who refuse heteronormative desire, be it intentionally or not. In so doing, Shomali does not settle the confusion that surrounds same-sex desire in the Arab world by codifying identities or harkening to precolonial homoerotics in search of authenticity. Indeed, queerness remains in the shadows, ephemeral or affective, never consolidated in narrative. Often misrecognized as either sexually oppressed or assimilated into Western sexual identities such as LGBTQ, Arab women are not ethically witnessed. Shomali addresses this failure by examining her archive for what is performed "between banat," and, in so doing, offers an alternative method of reading and listening to representations of and by Arab women. In the space of the "between," the transnational, the relational, the interregional, the transhistorical, and the affective comingle. Indeed, the "between" is a fecund framework that circumvents the pitfalls of binary or identarian thinking. Her "Queer Arab Critique" (a phrase she coins that riffs off of queer of color critique) simultaneously undermines dominant Eurocentric iterations of sexuality and Arab nationalist assertions that foreclose queer Arab sexualities altogether.The last chapter of the book, titled "Sahq: Queer Femme Futures," best exemplifies what can be learned from paying attention to and witnessing women if we are not invested in resolving Arab women's sexuality. Sahq, which means smash, crash, quash, and grind, is also the medieval Arabic word that describes same-sex acts among women. Shomali celebrates the word for its carnal connotations. In conjuring the rubbing and grinding of bodies, it rebuffs the paradigms of female respectability, exemplified in the iconic figure of Scheherazade prevalent in Arab literature. But Shomali also points to sahq's unique Arab etymology because of its versatility: it describes not only a sexual act and a sexual subject but also a political praxis. As a concept metaphor, if you will, sahq is suggestive of intimacy, fleshiness, and interactions between bodies. At a more abstract level, sahq offers a lens through which to discern "the grind against heteronormativity and patriarchy that queer Arabs must engage in order to exist in any form" (141). In sahq, Shomali rejects authenticity, grounds queer Arab activism via Arab traditions, and "looks for new ways to imagine Arab subjectivities" (142) in acts that are performed between subjects.Between Banat is a timely, significant contribution to a burgeoning field. It pays tribute to the existing scholars but also challenges and nudges the stakeholders to move in new directions. In creating a queer Arab archive, Shomali gifts queer Arabs a history through which to build new worlds and new ways of knowing. Between Banat insists on the transnational nature of this queer archive: its objects are not exclusive to any particular sect, religion, or nation but are found across the Arab world through interconnectedness and cultural exchange. The book inadvertently challenges how we understand ourselves as Arabs, not as divided through difference by a brutal legacy of European colonialism, but as connected through other terms such as culture and shared history. Between Banat reminds us that the Arab world is not static, and much like its queer past is continually becoming something new

Art · Grind · Heteronormativity · Human sexuality · Political science · Queer · Queer theory · Sociology · Engineering · Gender Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy