Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art

by Andrew Gayed

Premodern archives from the Middle East show rich and diverse homoerotic worlds that were disrupted by the colonial imposition of Western models of sexuality. Andrew Gayed traces how contemporary Arab and Middle Eastern diasporic artists have remembered and reinvented these historical ways of being in their work in order to imagine a different present. Building on global art histories and transnational queer theory, Queer World Making illuminates contemporary understandings of queer sexuality in the Middle Eastern diaspora. The author focuses on the visual works of artists who create political art about queer identity, including Jamil Hellu, Ebrin Bagheri, 2Fik, Laurence Rasti, Nilbar Güres, and Alireza Shojaian.

Through engaging with these artists, Gayed is seeking to articulate a Western and non-Western modernity that works beyond the dichotomy of sexual oppression, stereotypically associated with the Middle East, versus sexual acceptance, attributed to North American norms. Instead, Gayed traces how diasporic subjects create coming-out narratives and identities that provide alternatives to inscribed Western models. Queer World Making reframes Arab homosexualities in terms of desire and alternative gender norms rather than through Western notions of visibility and coming out, narratives that are not conducive to understanding how queer Arabs living in the West experience their sexuality.

Genres: Queer

324 pages, Paperback

Published March 26, 2024

Reviews

[Elisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book as core material for my Art and Resistance graduate course. It should be included in every Art History syllabus from now on. I hope it gets all the recognition it deserves because it opened my eyes to many truths we are not taught in a Westernized study of art and queerness. I also had the opportunity to meet Andrew in person, and he's an absolutely wonderful human being.