Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives

In the last chapter of her book Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique & Transnational Arab Archives, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali asks: “What would it mean to be queer, Arab, and OK?” (138). This question embraces Shomali’s generative research about queer Arab women as these categories of identity in specific sociohistorical and sociopolitical contexts exceed the heteropatriarchies, Arab nationalisms, and Orientalist discourses that “work in relation to mire queer Arab women’s horizons” (3). She opens the book with a critical intervention in Arab Studies and Arab archives that she calls “queer Arab critique.” Primarily centered around questions of language, translation, transnational experience, and subject formation, queer Arab critique seeks to defeat Orientalist binarism (East and West) and hetero-patriarchal colonial notions of gender and sexuality (heterosexual and homosexual). That is, queer Arab critique is interested in the interstitial—the in-between—from where desire, affective attachments, and queer enunciations center Arab women, banat.1In line with previous theoretical and methodological interventions such as queer of color critique and trans of color critique, queer Arab critique disrupts Western nation-states’ heteronormative and heteronational modes of queer subjectivity in specific relation to Arab nationalist paradigms in which configurations of queer Arab subjectivity often rely on tradition(al) respectable Arab subjects. Expanding queerness and Arabness as transnational and actively resisting subject formations, Shomali reminds us “that Arab womanhood is produced in constant tension with colonial and national discourses about Arab women” (19). Therefore, what happens between banat is ephemeral, fluid, and profoundly relational as noted in Shomali’s multigenre sites of analysis: literature, film, and art.This book review centers Shomali’s concept of sahq to engage with queer Arab critique as a description and direction of feeling where feeling becomes “the binding apparatus of the archive” and arguably the entryway to disrupting and rejecting Western articulations of sexuality (139). Sahq, writes Shomali, “can describe a sexual act, a sexual subject, a social and political praxis, and/or an orientation toward queer resistance” (140). In line with queer and trans of color critique, sahq as a part of queer Arab critique functions as a heterogeneous enterprise “to wrest cultural and aesthetic formations away from [Western and Orientalist] interpretations that neglected to situate those formations within analyses of racial capitalism and the racial state” and within analysis of technologies of gender and sexuality that have come to underpin Arab subjectivity only in relation to those heteropatriarchal and imperial formations.2 Differently oriented, queer Arab critique seeks to develop knowledges and subjectivities centered around women and femininity first: “This is not a ‘talking back’ to imperialism and patriarchy per se, but an attempt to start a new conversation in which banat are at the center” (141). As such, sahq “grounds queer activisms and politics in Arabic and Arab traditions” beyond a politics of heteronationalist cultural authenticity that would capture non-heteronormative subject formations into a Western orientation of queerness isolated from other modes of difference, i.e., Arab(ness) or queer(ness), rather than the co-constitutive possibility of Arab(ness) and queer(ness) (142).As a description and direction, saqh provides banat with a strategy of filiation, of relationality that envisions, imagines, and practices living queer Arab futures. And while these world-making socialites are often left in the envisioning process, sahq emphasizes “grind work,” actively noticing from where to cultivate the necessary conditions of existence—whether at the intersection of Arab femininity in The Thousand and One Nights, at the homoerotic touch of the belly dancer’s hip in film or homoerotic desire in Arab novels, or in the intimate politics of translation, transliteration, and naming practices in essay collections between banat.In the span of five chapters, the book showcases representations of homoerotic desire and anti-Western normative articulations of gender and sexuality, while simultaneously experiencing (doing) queer Arab critique in motion. Shomali notes that instead of searching for queer(ness) in Arab cultural archives or signs of sexual desire between women, these subject formations are always already in motion where subjects contain multiple orientations of personhood while disrupting unnecessary binary embodied dispositions of queer Arab womanhood. For example, in her analysis of The Thousand and One Nights, the character Scheherazade becomes a critical “index of multiple discourses that influence and at times preclude representations of Arab femininity” (28). Looking at two translations written over one hundred years apart, Shomali argues that “femininity is a crucial site of racial negotiation in Orientalist depictions of Arabs and in Arab responses to Orientalism,” so much so that it troubles demands for respectability in heteronational discourses of Arab femininity (28). This is a crucial intervention in Shomali’s work that previous analyses of this novel have disregarded. Intervening in the Arab archives, her read of Scheherazade in Arab American literature attempts “to mitigate the increased queerness of the Arab body in the transnational imaginary” where resorting to the colonial and racial regimentation of gender and sexuality comes at the expense (read: exclusion and displacement) of nonnormative, often queer, Arab bodies (35). Hence, the friction produced in this contradiction is the formation of sahq made possible at the interstitials of queer Arab critique.Another instance demonstrating the rejection of respectability politics through the site of women is in the “relational ruptures of desire” made evident in belly dance and belly dance venues which Shomali explores in Golden Era Egyptian Cinema (68). In this chapter, Shomali gifts us the four central concepts of queer Arab critique that call into question the current methodologies available for analyzing Arab cultural productions and deviate from heteronormative Orientalist and heteronational discourses that preclude queer subjects. These four concepts include queer spectatorship, queer space and time, flipped homoerotic triangulation, and queer containment (59–61).3 As opposed to the other chapters, this one centers the imagination that becomes available when the intimacy between women, homoerotic at times, destabilizes the presumption of heteronormativity and Arab femininity, while also highlighting the paradoxical rigidity that heteronormative standards foreclose (and contain) between women. In other words, Shomali asks us to “indulge in the moment of confusion” when, for instance, Azza gives Hoda a playful swat on her bottom while undressing her in the film Sigara wa Kass. Readers get a synopsis of heterosexual coupling between Hoda and Mamdouh, as well as a homoerotic attunement—the flipped homoerotic triangulation—between Hoda and Azza who supports Hoda in her belly dancing practice: “As in the dance scenes, Azza becomes the conduit for the viewer’s desire [also understood in the possible Orientalist view] of Hoda. She does so without assuming a masculine position; indeed, she can do so only from the safety of her femininity” (80). Not surprisingly, the capacity to not only read these scenes with a queer Arab critique framework but also a nonnormative lens that rejects Western technologies of gender and sexuality reminds readers of the onto-epistemological fervor that these critiques hold in relation to discourses of authenticity in sociohistorical contexts imbued with political colonial economy standards.One other instance that fosters Shomali’s groundbreaking intervention in Middle East Studies, Queer Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies, among other fields of study, is her read of essay collections and artistic productions “to argue that queer Arab subjects are unassimilable to Western narratives of LGBT identity, to Orientalist visions of Arab sexuality, and to heteronational responses to both” (119). The Arabic texts Shomali embraces in the chapter “Love Letters: Queer Intimacies and the Arabic Language” are a “labor of love” that counteracts “the process of anthologization and minority literature formation” discussed in the case of Scheherazade (120). Here, banat and femmes engage in profoundly rich epistolary exchanges with queer and homoerotic experiences explicitly or implicitly named. This results in an affective archive of queerness and Arabness at the intersection of, or between, women/banat. Through the toggling of insistence and ambivalence, the contributors of the essay collections “demand to be seen with a simultaneous refusal to be known” (121). Shomali notes this process happening in the way “the texts present queer Arabs as transnational and critical subjects whose identities are forged across national and linguistic boundaries, within and against colonialism, occupation, apartheid, and state violence” (125). The productive tension in this demand to be seen and the refusal to be known is forged by sahq, the friction and grind between sociohistorical and political narratives that have shaped a collective (and at times harmful) understanding of queerness and Arabness. As such, the grind in these collections appears when “queerness is not outside Arabness, and Arabness is not an inside one can inhabit. Both happen in relation to, and in between, multiple transnational discourses, spaces, and languages” (136). After all, “saqh reads for me as the closest transliteration for my transnational Palestinian tongue,” writes Shomali. Was it not for sahq as a formation in tandem, how would it be possible to be queer, Arab, and OK? (141).In conclusion, Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique & Transnational Arab Archives offers a crucial spatiotemporal intervention in identity-formation discourses, language across borders, and sexuality and gender technologies of selfhood between banat. One invitation for Shomali is to consider what tensions exist between the “of color” in queer of color, trans of color, crip of color, and her own queer Arab critique. What are the potential dangers of encasing “Arab” in the “people of color” designation in the context of Western US empire? While other language has unfolded to name diasporic experiences such as the acronym SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African), empire and Western conceptions of self still maintain the expectations of personhood illegible when outside heteronormative and Arab heteronational projects. Shomali invokes queer Arab futures through sahq and between banat that undo the respectability politics that saturate the perception of Arab femininity, queerness and Arabness, and other Orientalist depictions of queer Arab presence. Stitching together these sites of cultural analysis through sahq leaves readers with generative arguments, methodological tools, and interventions with which to reject and not collude with patriarchal and state violence practices. Instead, Shomali reminds us that for queer Arab subjects “the mere act of existence is a radical and stubborn activism that enables futurity” (173).