Sahq: Queer Femme Futures

This talk considers the utility of the Arabic term سحق (sahq) to name and imagine queer Arab subjectivity. It analyzes transnational Arab texts to offers sahq as an embodied form of queer action and world-making. It proposes we use sahq to describe same-sex practices, intimacies, and identities between Arabs and outline the direction and shape of queer Arab social and political practices. It details how these practices can circumvent the discursive and material limits placed on queer Arab subjects via Orientalism and Arab heteropatriarchies. It roots queer futures in the creative and political labor of Arab banat and femmes.

Bio: Mejdulene Bernard Shomali is a queer Palestinian poet and an associate professor in Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Her poetry can be read in Copper Nickel, Tinderbox, Diode Press, The Pinch Journal, Mizna, and elsewhere. She has published articles in Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the US, the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, and several edited collections. Her first book, Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives is available from Duke University Press. Her chapbook agriculture of grief: prayers for my father's dementia is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (August 2024). During the 23-34 academic year, she is in residence as a fellow at Cornell's Society for the Humanities working on her second project, Palestine Matters.