The SOAS Centre for Gender Studies and the SOAS GLBT Society Jointly Present:
Technologies of Violence and Control:
Performing Arab Queer Communities Online
This colloquium seeks to examine the formation of Arab queercollectivities, challenging traditional modes of identity politics and embodiment. Taking cyberspace as a site of analysis, Noor Al-Qasimiand Barrak Alzaid examine the ways in which various organizations and institutions that purport to advance sexual democracy produce a form of identity politics that effectively engenders violence and control.
Wednesday 13 January, 7-9pm, SOAS, Khalili lecture Theatre
How to Do Things With Violence: The Transmission of Affect and Production of Politicized Queer Identities
Barrak Alzaid’s paper investigates the interplay between digital media and violence to create communities rooted in LGBT identity formations through an analysis of the Iraqi LGBT website, and the close reading of one embedded video depicting the torture of a trans person in Iraq. The paper employs a methodology that combines a reflexive analysis of the author's process of witnessing and translation of the author's, coupled with a performative analysis of the work the video enacts.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Boyahs and Girls: Uploading Transnational Queer Subjectivities in the United Arab Emirates
Al-Qasimi’s paper focuses on how queer narratives on social networking sites (namely, Facebook) are accommodated and/or denied by laws pertaining to the governance of sexuality. Ultimately, she asks, to what extent does the Emirati national youth’s articulation of queerness transcend and transform collective sexual norms governed by the Emirati nationalist paradigm, allowing for the emergence of a transnational sexual politics that both destablizes sexual governance and reconstitutes the sovereignty of the nation state?
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