Status Updates From This Arab Is Queer: An Anth...

'Like many queer children, deep down I knew my existence was a transgression, that if I lived long enough I too, would be asked to step aside for someone else's respectable happines.'

“‘I wonder if the demand that marginalized artists repeatedly perform trauma – becoming trauma clowns – in our art is a way to contain and oppress us, politely or indirectly, from the comfort of a seat, hands clean,’ Vivek Shraya writes in her exquisite essay, ‘How did the suffering of marginalized artists become so marketable?’.“

“There is a tendency among the audiences of marginalised authors, such as myself, to assume that every piece of writing is a reflection of real-life events that the author went through. There is this tunnel vision that many audience members get; it generalises the experience of one marginalised writer for it to become the general experience of that marginalised community....”