Guest Editor’s Introduction: Queerness with Middle East Studies: Mapping out the Useful Intersections

What does the interaction between Middle East Studies and queerness look like? What does it signify? And why, if at all, does heeding this connection matter for both Queer and Middle East studies? This special issue navigates these questions and poses many more to generate a productive engagement with the set of politics and theories that “Queering the Middle East” enables. For example, if we were to begin by contemplating the set of meanings that “Queering” generates, and then place them in interaction with the “Middle East,” we will have to start by accounting for numerous questions that pertain to spaces and times across which meaning-production takes place. The emergence of the term “queer” has an official story, a common narrative that grounds meanings encompassing a set of non-normative political identities, owing to the specificities of times, AIDS and the spatialities of reproducing and navigating Western capitalist modernity. The necessary task of locating the spatiotemporal origins instructing the will to name “the queer” as such and categorically to identify the subjects enfolded within its official story, is one of accounting for the web of power-knowledge, à la Foucault, through which a deconstructive, queering critique trumps “queer” as an identity signifier. Queering, a verb and a theoretical inquiry, therefore, speaks to the necessities of disciplinary “unsettlement rather than systematization.”Footnote1 In other words, queering articulates the will to challenge the very terms through which it has been enabled, working against its own canonization and solidification within an official narrative and systematised origins. Queering’s failure to systematize the world does not collapse it to an investment in “irrelevance” as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner state, but rather “it means resistance to being an apparatus for falsely translating systematic and random violence into normal states, administrative problems, or minor constituencies.”Footnote2 We could pause here to contemplate how queering of the Middle East becomes a necessary task through which a challenge to the field’s normative assumptions and systematising of violence, including through the hailing of the very term “Middle East,” takes place.