Moving Femininities: Queer Critique and Transnational Arab Culture.

Abstract

Moving Femininities focuses on three diverse and eminent figures of Arab femininity: the Golden Era Egyptian belly dancer Samia Gamal (1924-1994), the pan-Arab storyteller of The Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade, and the Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled (b. 1944). By examining Arab and Arab American representations of each figure, my research demonstrates how Arab femininity is repurposed and remade by Arab and Arab American writers and artists struggling to represent Arab cultures against racism and Orientalism, all while remaining “authentically” Arab. I perform close readings of Gamal, Scheherazade, and Khaled in film, literature, and visual culture respectively; archival research, conducted in Egypt, Palestine, and the US provide cultural and historical context for my analysis. The project reveals how colonial logics limit the representations of femininity and produce a normative, narrow vision of Arab sexuality. My analysis reveals how Arab responses to colonialism and Orientalism have informed the representation of sexual and gendered norms; by destabilizing the representations of gender, sexuality, and race in these figures, I am able to locate subversive performances of gender and sexuality across their texts. As such, my work is a feminist and queer of color intervention in the scholarship on and representations of Arab gender and sexuality. Moreover, this dissertation examines how nations of origin affect those in the diaspora and how those in diaspora inform the home culture. Moving Femininities thus traces the movement of Arab cultures across national lines, the political movements enabled by attention to and regulation of femininity, and the new movements we might imagine for our queer Arab futures.