Lesbian is such an ugly word to me. It makes me cringe—especially the French version that is more often used in Lebanon, “Lesbienne” (with an elongated “ieeeen”). Ugh. Even worse was the word “dyke.” But it's still all good compared to “sou7aqiyyeh.” That one really makes me want to vomit. . . . I find it intriguing how people form certain images to go with words, how they give absolute meanings to words. When they say the word “lesbian,” it represents a single image in their heads. They have no idea what different and diverse people the word “lesbian” can represent.
Anonymous, Bareed Mista3jil: True Stories Footnote 1
I use “queer” to refer to a range of dissident and nonheteronormative practices and desires that may very well be incommensurate with the identity categories of “gay” and “lesbian.”
Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures Footnote 2
What is madness?
It appears to be a mysterious condition, much like life and death. You can learn a lot about it if you look at it from the outside, as for its interior, its core, it's a suppressed secret.
Najib Mahfuz, Hams al-Junun Footnote 3
Bareed Mista3jil [Express Mail]: True Stories (2009) is an anonymously published collection of autobiographical writings by queer Lebanese women. In these essays, sexuality is at the core of identity formation, individuality, family struggle, and a slew of social and political forces cutting across class and religious backgrounds. In the powerful interrogation of the word “lesbian” quoted above, from Arabic to English to French, the author identifies the cultural spaces at the intersection of which takes shape a constantly negotiated sexuality. Going back and forth between different intonations, affects, and connotations, the author engages in a process of difficult translation. She contests the monolithic nature of the word lesbian, insisting on its complexity in terms of type (butch, femme), sexual identification (gay, bi, trans), and cultural context (Arab, American, French). Lesbian is thus a multilayered word that triggers different reactions and cannot be reduced to a binary opposition that operates neatly along Western or Eastern sexual models. “Homosexual” and “homosexuality” are equally complex concepts, operating across cultural contexts and registers. These forms of negotiation frame representations and investigations of a queer Arab sexuality in contemporary literature and cultural production.Footnote 4
Recent critical attention to articulations of homosexuality in the Arab world such as Joseph Massad's Desiring Arabs focus on questions of Western hegemony and the Eurocentric framework of Arab modernity's legal, cultural, and political apparatus.Footnote 5 In Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, Afsaneh Najmabadi argues that modernity in 19th-century Iran involved processes of normalization of sex and gender.Footnote 6 Other works, such as Dror Ze'evi's Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900 and Khaled El-Rouayheb's Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World 1500–1800, engage with the Arabic and Ottoman literary and cultural traditions of same-sex love and practices.Footnote 7 In Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in French and Arabic Medieval Literatures, Sahar Amer reads articulations of homosexual love and desire at the intersection of Arabic and European literary, linguistic, and cultural models.Footnote 8 Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi's anthology, Islamicate Homosexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire, consists of a series of theoretical interventions that engage queer theory and sexuality studies, “putting into play a dialogue—sometimes comfortable, sometimes tense—between contemporary Euro-American lesbian/gay/queer studies and Middle Eastern/Islamicate studies.”Footnote 9 Collectively these works produce a critical direction for a new field of Arab and Islamic sexuality studies, which examines queer sexuality across disciplinary formations, theoretical frameworks, and cultural and literary traditions.
In line with this critical trajectory, this article investigates crossings of madness and homosexuality in works by Hanan al-Shaykh (b. 1945) and Hamdi Abu Golayyel (b. 1967) and draws on a variety of Arab-Islamic and Euro-American theoretical and cultural models. Engaging Michel Foucault's historical and epistemological models of “modern” and “premodern” in such works as History of Sexuality, Vol. I, Discipline and Punish, and History of Madness,Footnote 10 I argue that a critical dialogue with Foucault's reading of modernity serves to complicate clearly demarcated sexual models belonging to distinct cultural traditions. Examining Foucault's contribution in this context is twofold: it serves not only to critique the inadequacies of his theoretical model but also to acknowledge the importance of his analysis of sex and power. Investigating various forms of regulation and suppression of sexuality in Arabic texts, I interrogate the reading of modernity as a homogeneous project and system of authority transplanted from the West to the East.Footnote 11 To be specific, I investigate the ways in which a queer Arab sexuality arises from modernity's intertwinement with nonmodern systems of beliefs and practices represented in contemporary novels.
I argue that al-Shaykh's Innaha London ya ʿAzizi (Only in London), first published in 2001, articulates homosexuality through antisocial acts of madness across cultural and linguistic registers and literary traditions.Footnote 12 In Lusus Mutaqaʿidun (Thieves in Retirement), published in 2002, Hamdi Abu Golayyel's association of homosexuality with madness serves to identify a new site of resistance to social and political violence.Footnote 13 In both novels, the homosexual and Majnun-like character resists the codification of his sexuality and social behavior, whether in Beirut, London, or Cairo, systematically unsettling the distinction between sane and insane, modern and premodern, and East and West. This embodied resistance ushers in a new configuration of Majnun: a homosexual rebel and impassioned lover, disrupting social norms and exposing structures of violence. Though confused and combated, he expresses his desire through gestures and obsessive behavior. My comparative reading of the queer Majnun in al-Shaykh and Abu Golayyel anchors current debates about Arab homosexuality in the bodily and the performative as sites of transformation of the Arabic novel.
QUEER CONTEXTS
Representations of homosexuality and homoeroticism in Arabic literature span a wide range of texts and cultural and historical registers. In his 1947 novel, Zuqaq al-Midaqq (Midaq Alley), Najib Mahfuz presents the homosexual as a married man, a marginal figure of the Cairene ḥāra (neighborhood).Footnote 14 In the 1990 Hajar al-Dahk (The Stone of Laughter) Huda Barakat portrays the struggles of her main character, Khalil, with homosexuality in a social context shaped by the Lebanese civil war (1975–90).Footnote 15 In Tuqus al-Isharat wa-l-Tahawwulat (Rituals of Signs and Transformations) (1994), Syrian playwright Saʿd Allah Wannus offers a complex view of the interplay of same-sex love and models of masculinity in 19th-century Damascus.Footnote 16 Siba al-Hirz, Saudi author of al-Akharun (The Others) (2006), produces a languorous narrative about a woman's desire for other women.Footnote 17 Hatim Rashid, the homosexual character in ʿAlaʾ al-Aswani's ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan (The Yacoubian Building) (2002), though killed at the end, is strong and assertive, dismissive of any attempt to shame him.Footnote 18
Analyzing representations of homosexuality in modern Arabic literature, Frédéric Lagrange argues that during the Arab encounter with modernity in the 19th century, European values and practices challenged Arab models of desire through discourses on civilization and cultural development. Taking Lagrange's thesis further, Joseph Massad provides a critique of the colonial and orientalist discursive practices that have systematically produced knowledge about sexuality in the Arab world. From the role of nongovernmental organizations to the reactions of local governments accused of violating homosexual rights, Massad identifies a set of political and cultural forces that contribute to the discursive production of Euro-American notions of gay and lesbian identities in the Arab world.Footnote 19 Massad's drawing on the rich legacy of Islamicate sexualities and, for instance, on the work of Khaled el-Rouayheb, which situates homosexuality and homoeroticism within an Arab-Islamic historical and cultural context, makes possible further investigations of the intertwinement of Arabic and European cultural models.
Recognizing the importance of the critique of orientalism, I interrogate both the reading of modernity as a coherent project imposed by colonial violence and recent critical appropriation of the Arabic tradition as a repository of authentic sexualities suppressed by this project. I situate the discursive production of queer sexualities in a complex network of translation and signification that arises comparatively in between the Arab-Islamic tradition and contemporary literary representations and theoretical models. The return to tradition and its literary and philosophical models could only arise from the dialectical encounter with modernity. Reclaiming this tradition as a site of resistance to Western hegemony depicts an impossible return to something that has been irretrievably lost. Only a comparative analysis in between contemporary and classical texts, and Arabic and European cultural contexts, could produce a complex understanding of the development of sexual and gender models in Arabic literature and culture.
In Volume I of History of Sexuality Michel Foucault argues that the 19th century in Europe witnessed the birth of the homosexual. Identifying the word “homosexual” in Westphal's essay from 1870, Foucault demonstrates that homosexuality in its modern form was discursively produced through the psychiatric and legal systems that sought to classify, categorize, treat, and contain it.
The 19th-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him. . . . The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.Footnote 20
Foucault establishes a temporal and development distinction between the modern and the premodern, reading the “now” as the stage for the discursive production of homosexuality as an identity through a scientia sexualis that turns the homosexual into a historical subject, distinct from the premodern or non-Western sodomite. The homosexual as a “species” becomes recognizable through a particular physical configuration that gives him shape and makes him visible. The categories of “homosexual” and “sodomite” in this context allow Foucault to expose the deployment of new forms of power invested with political and scientific authority. He distinguishes Western modernity's production of homosexuality through a system of scientific and juridical truth from an Eastern and premodern ars erotica, from which sexuality evolved through an economy of pleasure.Footnote 21 Foucault's distinction of modern and premodern, scientia sexualis and ars erotica, is by no means ontological but rather instrumental; it is necessary for his theoretical topos that seeks to trace modernity's construction of subjectivity through discourses on sex and power. Nonetheless, Foucault's formulation and its critical appropriation often preclude disciplinary crossings, treating the modern Western narrative as distinct both from its premodern counterpart in the West and from that which is imagined as being outside of the West. For Foucault, argues Dina Al-Kassim, “the premodern and the Eastern are thereby always defined by an opposition that secures their uniqueness by saving them from modern disciplinary projections.”Footnote 22 Engaging and critiquing Foucault's model serve to complicate both this model and its appropriation by recent critical assessments of homosexuality in modern Arabic literature and culture.
Foucault fails to acknowledge the correlation between the modern and the premodern, East and West, which is systematically staged in contemporary Arabic literature and in the long and constantly evolving intellectual and cultural relation between Arabic and European texts and cultures. Sahar Amer argues that Foucault's understanding of homosexuality stifles the recognition of other gay- and lesbian-like identities pervasive in Arabic and European cultural frameworks. Reading homosexuality in French and Arabic medieval writings, Amer identifies a queer intertext with hybrid linguistic registers, motifs, and metaphors. This queer textuality undermines the association between sexuality and cultural purity and between modernity and tradition. Framing it within a historical context that is as determined by cultural exchange as it is by conflict and resistance, the intertextuality Amer identifies represents a strategic site for the investigation of homosexuality in contemporary Arabic literature at the intersection of Arab-Islamic and European cultural traditions and theoretical contexts.
INNAHA LONDON
In The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, Emily Apter analyzes the state of texts and the relation of languages to sites of power. She defines “translation zone” as a site “‘in-translation,’ that is to say, belonging to no single, discrete language or single medium of communication . . . [that] applies to diasporic language communities, print and media public spheres [and] theaters of war . . .”Footnote 23 Apter's notion cuts across physical borders by imagining complex spaces of interaction and negotiation. Queering these spaces, Gayatri Gopinath reads desire in between articulations of home and diaspora, thereby situating it in processes of negotiation across cultural and linguistic registers. In this context, Gopinath notes, “the radical disruption of the hierarchies between nation and diaspora, heterosexuality and homosexuality, original and copy, that queer diasporic texts enact hinges on the question of translation.”Footnote 24 This translation, however, is not merely a mode of communication across languages and cultural contexts but also involves models of performativity that inscribe meaning in the body.
Thinking through the categories and frameworks developed by Apter and Gopinath, I focus on Innaha London's representation of homosexuality at the periphery of the Western metropolis, in between London and Beirut, examining the ways in which queer desire challenges social norms both in Europe and in the Arab world. The queer character's transgressive expression of sexuality takes shape at the intersections of Arab-Islamic literature and language, home and diaspora, and American and European pop culture and discourses on sex and civilization. Al-Shaykh appropriates yet complicates Western articulations of homosexuality as belonging to a clearly identifiable and culturally circumscribed modern project. In al-Shaykh's text, queer Arab sexuality takes shape as a position of dissidence and rebellion against the normative structures of homo/hetero and ideological constructions of authentic Arab-Islamic sexual practices opposed to homosexuality's discursive production in the West.
Al-Shaykh's humorous narrative starts on a plane going through turbulence, transporting the four main characters from Dubai to London. The metaphor of the plane, hurling “up and down like a yo-yo,”Footnote 25 depicts the characters’ cultural and psychological states. The turbulence and the reference to Dubai, the global city par excellence, disrupt the spatial and cultural boundaries of East and West, strategically destabilizing fixed models of desire, identity, and language.Footnote 26 Amira, a Moroccan prostitute, is returning home from a disappointing “business” trip; Lamis, a recently divorced Iraqi woman who also lives in London, is returning from a failed attempt to settle down in Dubai; Nicholas, a British expert on Islamic art, is returning from a trip to Oman; and, finally, Samir, a middle-aged Lebanese man, married with five children and living in the United Arab Emirates, comes to London for the first time in quest of sexual freedom.
As the plot evolves, London emerges as a fantasized space of personal and sexual fulfillment. Lamis and Nicholas fall in love; she perceives him as the British man who will allow her to express her sexuality freely, and he sees her as the beautiful yet fragile Arab woman in need of protection. The two lovers struggle to overcome their cultural projections, leading the relation to a standstill. Meanwhile, Amira, the one who brings everyone together in the narrative, decides to explore new professional horizons by pretending to be a Gulf princess in order to swindle wealthy Arab men in London. After a few successes, she gets caught and beaten in a humiliating and tragic scene. As for Samir, with no place to go, he moves in with Amira and becomes her most loyal companion. Accompanied by his pet monkey, Samir sets out to discover London, never wanting to return to his wife, kids, and the life he left behind.
Depicted as a “flamboyantly dressed man,” wearing a Versace shirt and cowboy boots and looking like Klinger in Mash,Footnote 27 Samir's transvestism is transcultural. It is shaped by the worlds of fashion and television from Lebanon to Italy to Hollywood, blurring the lines between East and West, native and foreign. Entering the first-class cabin in order to find a sedative for the pet monkey he is illegally transporting in a basket and that is threatening to expose him, Samir approaches Lamis: “Excuse me, Mamselle. Please, have you got a sedative? My nerves . . .”Footnote 28 Al-Shaykh's text emphasizes the imminent advent of madness with the repetition of such expressions as dakhīlik (I implore you) and raḥ jinn (I'm about to go mad or I will go mad).Footnote 29 Describing his emotional breakdown, Samir uses the word jinn, a colloquial expression that could denote disbelief, frustration, and anger and that is derived from the word jinn as in genie or spirit. Soon after he gets his sedatives, Samir comes back for more. When Lamis tells him that she has just given him some, Samir replies: “I know. You gave me two. I'm not crazy even though I might look it . . .”Footnote 30 In this second instance, the word majnūn (crazy, mad) takes on a new meaning, aligning Samir's emotional state with his appearance. This etymological play and confusion bring to mind yet another Lebanese colloquialism, majnūneh (crazy or mad woman, also khawta), which is similar to the French colloquial word folle (queen, fairy). Samir thus goes back and forth between junūn as a mental disorder and junūn as the expression of a flamboyant homosexual desire recognizable in dress and actions. In both cases, the question of sexuality and its articulation on the plane—and, later, in London —is framed through movement, shaking up, and breaking down. These somatic states constitute the framework through which sexuality takes shape in the novel.
HISTORIES OF MADNESS
In History of Madness, Michel Foucault argues that while madness in the European Middle Ages was associated with the mystical and the supernatural, the 17th and 18th centuries consecrate madness as the antithesis of reason (déraison, unreason). The 19th century gradually produces madness as a mental illness through medical and psychiatric discourses. The mad person is incarcerated and forced to confess in the European asylums into the 20th century. However, this break with the premodern in Foucault's model is not complete. In fact, madness as a state of possession by the spirits haunts the psychiatric production of madness. In the novels I examine, madness takes shape at the intersection of the psychiatric clinic and the supernatural world.
In the Arab-Islamic context, advances in sciences in the Middle Ages had, early on, produced madness as a treatable mental illness. The 11th-century physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980–1037) devotes a section of his Qanun fi al-Tibb (Canon of Medicine) to mental illnesses. During that time, Islamic psychiatric clinics abounded in Egypt, Syria, and throughout the Islamic world. This shows that some form of psychiatric institution, treating madness as a curable illness, coexisted with representations of madness as a state of possession. In Khitab al-Junun fi al-Thaqafa al-ʿArabiyya (Madness in Arab Culture), Syrian critic Muhammad Hayyan al-Samman reads madness in the works of a series of thinkers, from al-Jahiz (781–868) to Ibn Khaldun (1132–1406). Quoting al-Naysaburi (d. 1016), al-Samman suggests that the mad challenge mainstream beliefs, customs, and dress codes.Footnote 31 The majnūn is thus the rebel, the entertainer, and the prophetic figure. Al-Samman further argues that the voice of madness in Islamic texts and historical narratives is that of the dissident speaking truth to power by challenging social and political norms. Expressing the collective will of the oppressed and the marginalized, the mad one violently subverts social order in words and deeds.
Ibn Manzur (1233–1311) defines junūn as a form of veiling (sitr) and withdrawal of reason (ʿaql).Footnote 32 This junūn is often associated with a state of amorous possession in the Arabic literary tradition. The most notable example can be found in the story of Layla and Majnun, from the 7th century, recorded in al-Isfahani's (897–972) 10th-century work, Kitab al-Aghani (The Book of Songs). In this narrative of ʿUdhri or unrequited love, the inability of Majnun (his real name is Qays ibn al-Mulawwah [d. 688]) to unite with his beloved Layla drives him to madness and death.Footnote 33 ʿUdhri love poetry derives from the practices of a Yemeni tribe, Banu ʿUdhra, whose men were known for powerful infatuation and unconsummated love that often led to death. In this context, madness depicts a state of being consumed by one's own desire, likened to invisible demons or jinn. Jamil (d. 701) is another important example of an ʿUdhri poet whose public declaration of love (for Buthayna) brings about his debilitating obsession. Roger Allen notes that “the story of Jamil involves a breaking of the tribal code regarding contact between the sexes, in that he publicly revealed his feelings towards his beloved.”Footnote 34 This characterization of the lover's junūn, caused by the beloved's disappearance, coincides with the public declaration of love and desire. Junūn thus characterizes not only the passion itself but also its public expression. In this light, Samir's junūn in Innaha London refers both to his mental state and to his veiled desire, embodied in transgressive acts and words in London. Junūn thus operates as an unveiling of desire that shatters and destabilizes the social and cultural codes of love and sexuality. And just as Majnun, Layla's lover, befriends the animals on his maddening quest for his beloved, Samir and his Capuchin monkey set out on their junūn, a maddening pursuit of blond men in London.
The strategic association of Samir's sexuality with madness through junūn's fluctuation across cultural registers (Arabic, British, French) gives rise to a new language of desire in the novel. Looking and acting mad, Samir transgresses cultural and social norms. The monkey in the basket, waiting to be set free in London, mirrors Samir's sexual desire.Footnote 35 Once Samir gets his sedatives from Lamis, he says: “‘I want to tell you a secret. Please swear you'll keep it to yourself. Swear you won't tell on me . . . I've got a little monkey in this basket [ʿandeh bi-l-salleh saʿden ṣghīr].’”Footnote 36 Samir “comes out” to Lamis as someone who is trafficking a monkey in a basket and needs a sedative to keep it asleep. Samir's announcement that he is going to go mad (raḥ jinn) thus implies that he is about to act like a monkey insofar as the monkey is a majnūneh (folle, flamboyant homosexual) who will come out of its basket once the plane lands and the sedatives’ effects dissipate. Raḥ jinn, in this context, is not simply a characterization of an unstable psychological state due to the plane's turbulence and Samir's fear of getting caught by British customs; it is also a statement of intent, that is, raḥ jinn, “I will go mad,” once the plane lands and the monkey is set free. Raḥ jinn thus operates as a performative utterance, framing Samir's expression of desire in London as the advent of unrestrained acts of social and sexual transgression, monkey-like.Footnote 37 Coming out in London thus draws not only on modern articulations of homosexuality and sexual freedom in the West but also on the Arab-Islamic tradition and its treatment of junūn as a state of dissidence and subversion through dress, behavior, and expression of desire.
THE BROTHEL, THE CLINIC, AND THE ASYLUM
Samir fantasizes London as a paradise of normative homosexuality where “he'd see rows of English boys . . . walking hand in hand.”Footnote 38 However, he struggles to interpret the world around him given his limited understanding of English. His experience of going—unknowingly—to an HIV clinic best exemplifies the articulation of junūn in London. While at a phone booth in SoHo, Samir notices an advertisement with a picture of two men kissing. Overwhelmed by his desire and unable or unwilling to understand the English text, he hails a taxi, shows the driver the ad, and asks him to drive to the designated location. Once there, he enters a neatly organized and sanitized space, unlike the “homosexual brothel” he'd imagined. A receptionist with a picture of a little girl on her desk welcomes him and hands him a form to fill out. Perplexed, Samir imagines that in England “everything is done according to laws and protocol, even you-know-what.”Footnote 39 Though the space falls short of the fantasized brothel, Samir insists on sexualizing it nonetheless. Explaining to her that he is unable to fill out the form, the receptionist proceeds to ask him a series of personal questions, making him uncomfortable, and, soon enough, critical of the laws and codes that regulate sexuality in England. “‘Even the things that people think are going to be difficult are simple in our country . . . there are no contracts or forms to fill in. You can do it in graveyards, garages, at roadblocks.’”Footnote 40 In this statement, Samir critiques Foucault's scientia sexualis as a model that subjects sex to the knowledge-power law. The woman at the clinic asks Samir the truth about his sexuality, forcing him to confess by writing it down. As Samir resists this codification of sexuality in London, he conjures war-torn Lebanon (with the reference to “road blocks,” the war's infamous signifiers) as the place of freedom. Consequently, the perception of England as the site of sexual liberation gives way to England as the site where a modern legal and medical apparatus constrains desire and interrupts its play. Samir's sexual dissidence thus aligns the collapse of social and political order in Lebanon as a result of the civil war with sexual freedom, critiquing in this way the Western codification of sexuality through the medical institution represented by the HIV clinic.
After the receptionist asks him his age and medical history and whether he had contracted any sexually transmitted diseases in the past, Samir becomes very angry and frustrated, refusing to become what Foucault calls a “confessing animal.”Footnote 41 Realizing that he speaks Arabic, the woman calls up a colleague, James, who had lived in Egypt and could communicate with him. While Samir fantasizes about the “beautiful” James, currently unavailable, the receptionist suggests:
“Shall we try together, then if you feel you really want James . . .?” She wants to try with me, to convince me to give up my habit and start liking women. I understand now, he thought. You put photos of children up so that men will decide they're longing to have a family. She was like his father's sister who used to hit him and say, “Walk straight. Like a soldier. Don't swing your hips.” She was the one who'd arranged for him to be married off.Footnote 42
Expecting sexual emancipation in London, Samir finds instead the apparatus of his desire's containment. He interprets the little girl's picture on the receptionist's desk and the invitation to “try together” as acknowledgements of his homosexuality en guise of suppressing it. The memory triggered in this encounter is that of the aunt who had forced Samir into an arranged marriage. In this light, the modern institution of the clinic becomes complicit in Samir's eyes with traditional family authority, both seeking to suppress his desire through acts of emotional and physical violence, constraining and regulating his sexuality within the confines of marriage and the medical establishment. Through Samir's miscommunication and misunderstanding in this scene, Beirut and London become interchangeable. When he heads to the clinic (or what he thinks is a brothel) in order to perform an act of junūn (madness)—having sex with men—Samir finds his desire curbed and stifled. This sets the stage for the articulation of a queer desire in opposition to, yet in between two, different forms of social and political authorities: the Lebanese family and the British medical institution.
Samir's trip to the clinic conjures traumatic childhood experiences. The aunt's violent enforcement of social norms is tied to early encounters with madness. When Samir's parents caught him cross-dressing on the rooftop at the age of thirteen, they sent him to a mental institution. The narrator reveals that when Samir's mother saw him, “she called her husband . . . and edged away from her son, scared that he would throw himself off the rooftop if she went closer. Her crazy relative had jumped off a rooftop. Mad people hated anyone touching them when they were having one of their fits.”Footnote 43 The son's dancing and cross-dressing align majnūn as mad with majnūn as majnūna (queen or fairy). In constructing an identifiable homosexual narrative of the teenager possibly attempting suicide, the narrator ties in Samir's actions with those of the mother's relative, another majnūn who had jumped to his death. Since Samir's fit on the rooftop is one of possession by the jinn that make one mad, the mother's distance from her son disavows both a fear of coming in touch with the possessed and a genuine concern for her son's safety.
Samir's homosexuality, even on this rooftop in Lebanon, takes shape at the intersection of cultural and linguistic traditions that could not be reduced to Lebanon or Arab culture in any exclusive or authentic manner. Samir's homosexuality, likened to madness, involves models of gay teenage behavior and psychological development, 1950s and 1960s psychiatric “treatment” of homosexuality, and French and Lebanese colloquialisms, to name a few. In this context, it's important to recognize the characterization of the psychiatric hospital in colloquial Lebanese as ʿasfūriyyeh (from ʿasfūr, bird, i.e., the place of the birds or birdlike). This reference emphasizes the relation between sexuality and freedom, on the one hand, and the expression of desire and its institutional disciplining, on the other hand. The ʿasfūriyyeh to which Samir is sent seeks to clip his wings and prevent him from committing suicide by flying off the rooftop. In an attempt to cure his homosexuality, the asylum in Lebanon subjects Samir to electric-shock “therapy.” In this light, references to the psychiatric hospital, the HIV clinic, and the brothel shape the articulation of Samir's queer desire in London. This desire is expressed through transgressive, compulsive, and flamboyant acts that require interpretation across linguistic and cultural registers and theoretical frameworks from the Arab-Islamic tradition to Foucault. This queer sensorium, embodied in fits and shocks, compulsive behavior and visceral reactions, frames the articulation of homosexuality in the novel.
The play of affects and the interconnection of various discursive practices and cultural contexts in Innaha London complicate the Foucauldian model yet simultaneously challenge its dismissal as a Eurocentric framework inapplicable to a non-Western context. The liminal space Samir occupies in this diasporic and translation zone interrogates the modern codification of desire identified by Foucault. From the family and the psychiatric hospital in Lebanon to the HIV clinic in London, the expression of Samir's desire unsettles the distinctness of modern and premodern cultural and medical contexts. Samir's junūn, which is psychological and sexual, social and political, refigures the reading of modernity as the model of social and sexual normativity that arises in the West and is transplanted into the East. Samir's desire arises from a network of interactions and exchanges that ties in Foucault's psychiatric clinic with possession by jinn, Western modernity with family authority, and Beirut with London. By collapsing these different discursive and cultural contexts, al-Shaykh's character resists the critical framework that seeks to isolate, through its reading of sexuality, East from West and modern from premodern.
SOCIAL SUBVERSION
Subjected to the psychiatric asylum and to electric-shock “therapy” since his youth, Samir transgresses social norms in London. Gripped by his inner demons—the unseen jinn that bring about his seizure or junūn—Samir seeks out his blond men by stopping them in the street, touching them, and chatting them up. In one instance, Samir accosts a handsome youth from Bosnia.Footnote 44 Being Lebanese, Samir tries to establish a bond by bringing up their respective war experiences. When this seduction strategy fails, Samir insists that the young man try on the jacket Samir is wearing and that the young man liked. Samir exploits the miscommunication to wrap the jacket around the youth, violating social norms and physical boundaries. Monkeylike, Samir performs his desire through antisocial acts. His nonverbal communication, which directly brings forth the relation to the body through touching and gesturing, works in tandem with linguistic miscommunication. While his actions and clothing could be considered humorous, they in fact threaten and undermine social order in London.
Moreover, the narrator reveals that during Lebanon's civil war, Samir would cross-dress in boas and gowns and chat up and entertain militiamen in the streets.Footnote 45 The narrator explains that the war and the ensuing collapse of the rule of law emancipated Samir from the social restrictions that stifled his desire. In this way, al-Shaykh aligns London with war-torn Beirut, representing them as stages (as in theater) upon which Samir performs junūn. While in Lebanon his junūn is symptomatic of the state's collapse, in London his junūn unsettles the “overbearing” norms regulating desire and social interactions.
Samir's transgressive acts and flamboyant clothing and demeanor could be associated with Arab-Islamic representations of madness over centuries of literary and cultural development. They could also be interpreted as drag performativity, extensively theorized in queer theory.Footnote 46 Judith Butler argues that performativity, through actions and words, produces gender and sexuality as “essential” components of one's identity. In the act of performance, drag has the potential to displace categories of authenticity and imitation as well as normative constructions of gender and sexuality.Footnote 47 Crossing homosexuality and madness in the novel through references to Samir's junūn thus serves to present the flamboyant and outrageously dressed homosexual as a rebel against social and political codification of desire. Al-Shaykh's depiction of the mad and flamboyant homosexual, transgressor of social norms, highlights an intertextuality that connects the Arab-Islamic tradition with contemporary theories of social and sexual subversion.
Hanan al-Shaykh's representation of junūn in Innaha London could be traced to her earlier novel, Hikayat Zahra (The Story of Zahra), published in 1980.Footnote 48 Caught in warfare, Zahra is a depressed woman who is often described as mad. Escaping her oppressive father through a loveless marriage, she finds herself trapped in a relationship that drives her further into despair.Footnote 49 In both Hikayat Zahra and Innaha London war stages the advent of madness. Whereas fear and depression characterize the madness of Zahra, the heroine of the Lebanese war novel from the 1980s, a transgressive and flamboyant homosexuality characterizes that of Samir in al-Shaykh's later work. Innaha London's mad figure ties in Zahra with the ʿUdhri poet, Majnun, linking literary developments in modern Arabic literature to articulations of madness and desire from the classical period. Mirroring both Zahra's fits and the ʿUdhri poet's quest for the elusive beloved, Samir pursues and falls in love with men in London who acknowledge yet fail to reciprocate his desire. Expressed through acts of transgression that systematically expose social and political violence, Samir's desire incorporates Majnun's tribulations and Zahra's anxieties.
The alignment of homosexuality with madness in Innaha London serves to identify multiple instances of miscommunication, resistance, and collapse. These instances are sites of investigation of queer sexuality in contemporary Arabic literature. Engaging with and critiquing the Foucauldian framework of sexual and epistemological development, my reading of madness and homosexuality in Innaha London thus extends the reading of forms of desire to intertextual and intercultural spaces that could not be reduced to models of authenticity and homogeneity. The staging of the queer body in al-Shaykh's text produces a complex configuration of Arab sexuality and subjectivity, thereby challenging simple binaries of East/West and modern/premodern.
LUSUS MUTAQAʿIDUN
Set in the working-class, “fringe neighborhood”Footnote 50 of Manshiyat Nasir in greater Cairo, Hamdi Abu Golayyel's Lusus Mutaqaʿidun, published by Dar Merit in 2002, appropriates the narrative structure of Mahfuz's Awlad Haritna (Children of the Alley),Footnote 51 positioning the narrator as a stranger to, yet resident of, the neighborhood, which is centered around Abu Gamal's ʿamāra (apartment complex). Whereas in Mahfuz's novel, the God-like Gabalawi is the undisputed patriarch who mediates between his various sons, the new Gabalawi (Abu Gamal) in Abu Golayyel's work is lacking in authority, forced to cover his weakness by oppressing the homosexual son. Sayf, Abu Gamal's assertive and defiant youngest son, gradually emerges as the rebellious figure in the novel. His family suppresses his overt sexual behavior by beating him, trying to kill him, incarcerating him in an asylum, and, finally, marrying him off. Similar to al-Shaykh's Samir, who is institutionalized and forced into an arranged marriage when signs of his homosexuality first appear, Abu Golayyel's Sayf is the target of familial violence whose homosexuality is acknowledged yet suppressed. Sayf's “condition” is referred to as junūn—a space of queerness that is systematically forced outside of the social.
The narrator describes Sayf as putting on makeup and lipstick and wearing tight clothes in order to accentuate his body parts.Footnote 52 This appearance conjures up Foucault's homosexual as a species with a visible morphology and physical characteristics. Adopting a peculiar mannerism in speech and acts, Sayf seduces men from outside and inside the neighborhood, including the narrator. It is also revealed that the eighteen-year-old Sayf repeatedly attempted suicide (like gay teenagers do when they become aware of their difference and experience persecution). The narrator claims that society damns young men who act like women by denouncing them with all kinds of slurs, “the least burdensome of which is ‘insane’ [junūn].”Footnote 53 The narrator describes how the neighbors were all gossiping about Sayf's madness—speculating about his homosexuality.Footnote 54Junūn applies to those whose demeanors and dress defy social and sexual norms. Sayf's nonconformity coincides with a type of madness that is discursively produced and circulated by the community. The neighbors’ gossip produces homosexuality as an antisocial and subversive behavior. Like Samir in Innaha London, Sayf shocks the ḥāra (neighborhood) by flaunting his desire at a variety of levels. The mad person here resembles not only the homosexual in Foucault's sense but also the rebel discussed in al-Samman's reading of madness as a category of opposition to social authority in the Arab-Islamic cultural context.
Sayf is first mentioned in the novel when the narrator, a tenant in Abu Gamal's building, overhears Gamal blaming his father for failing to kill Sayf.Footnote 55 Sayf's homosexuality likened to madness is presented as the source of the family's shame. According to Gamal, the “cure” for Sayf's overt homosexuality is murder.Footnote 56 After mentioning this unfinished “honor crime,” the narrator explains that while the real power struggle between Abu Gamal and his eldest son, the drug-dealing and socially mobile Gamal, is about the control of the dwelling space (ʿamāra), its apparent manifestation is centered on Sayf's homosexuality. The older son, Gamal, is the leader of the pack, fighting his father and insisting on the elimination of the khawal (effeminate gay man) in the family. This elimination allows Gamal to deflect the attention from his own corruption and salvage a patriarchal authority he seeks to appropriate. Countering the gossip about Sayf's junūn thus brings about Gamal's intervention, leading him to lock his brother up in an insane asylum. This act highlights the complicity of the modern institution—the psychiatric clinic—with the “traditional” ḥāra's enforcement of social and sexual norms.
MAKING HOMOSEXUALITY DISAPPEAR
Gamal uses his “contacts” to have his brother incarcerated, expressing satisfaction at the latter's “disappearance” (ikhtifāʾ)Footnote 57 in the asylum without a psychiatric examination or assessment of his case. In this intervention, the modern institution is at the service of a violent and corrupt patriarchal power, which seeks to restore its legitimacy and counter ill repute by eliminating the mad, queer son. Abu Golayyel uses the word ikhtifāʾ as if the institutionalization is an act of hijacking perpetrated by some state-security apparatus against a political dissident. While ikhtifāʾ connotes a process of disappearing or an arrest conducted at night, the scene of Sayf's ikhtifāʾ occurs in broad daylight. Abu Golayyel describes the scene in which ʿarabiyyat al-maganīn (madmobile) stops in front of the ʿamāra in order to abduct Sayf.Footnote 58 This ikhtifāʾ, perpetrated against Sayf in front of the entire neighborhood, conjures a spectacle of ritualized punishment akin to the one Foucault theorizes in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison as the site of deployment of the premodern power of the sovereign. According to Foucault, the rise of modernity through systems of incarceration and punishment coincides with the decline of corporeal punishment and the abstraction of the operation of justice. Foucault argues that the modern system moves from the torture of the condemned's body to its reform through disciplining practices in prisons. Foucault marks this transition, framing his argument by describing the public punishment perpetrated against Damiens, a man accused of killing his father under the ancien régime.
[Damiens] was to be “taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds”; then, “in the said cart, to the Place de Grève, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs, and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur . . . and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds.”Footnote 59
Since Damiens's crime operates as a violation of the king's body, his public torture seeks to reactivate monarchic power and dissuade onlookers from violating it. The modern system of incarceration displaces the body of the sovereign as the site of transgression, instead producing the culprit as subject of reform. Modern subjectivity, produced through the institutions of the prison and the asylum, becomes the necessary framework for transitioning from the monarchy to the nation–state, from public punishment to correction, cure, and reform.
Like the cart that parades Damiens before making him disappear, Sayf is made to disappear in front of his family and neighborhood. The public display of Sayf's abduction and ikhtifāʾ aligns the premodern institution of punishment and justice with that of the modern state, represented by the asylum's ambulance. Sayf's madness and homosexuality, like the parricide in Damiens's case, mark the killing of the father at two levels. First, the punishment and ritualized public abduction seek to restore the family honor, soiled by Sayf's public expression of homosexuality through antisocial dress and actions. Second, they mark the erasure of Abu Gamal's patriarchal position, because it was his son Gamal who orchestrated Sayf's abduction and not him. In fact, the narrator reveals that the abduction enrages Abu Gamal, who experiences it as an affront to his authority. Sayf's abduction and incarceration thus produce the father as weak, displaced from his patriarchal position by the older son. It also produces Sayf's homosexuality and madness as a site of ikhtifāʾ (disappearance). The act and ritual of ikhtifāʾ as punishment frame the process through which homosexuality is treated and disciplined in Lusus.
Abu Golayyel's novel captures the desire of power to see homosexuality disappear. However, the notion of ikhtifāʾ is tied to another important word from the same root, takhaffī (disguise). This disguise operates in the novel's context as a form of drag, expressed in Sayf's clothing and behavior. Ikhtifāʾ and takhaffī as forms of drag thus apply to the performativity of Sayf's desire before and after incarceration. Once released from the asylum, Sayf disguises himself (yatakhaffā) as a woman in order to seduce and have sex with the narrator. Furthermore, Sayf expresses his desire bi-l-khifya (in secret), first by marrying and second by venturing out of the ḥāra at night, cruising the streets of Cairo in search of men. These forms of takhaffī, duly noted by Sayf's wife and family, are accepted forms of homosexuality, which has been forced into the space of disguise and veiling.
The notion of ikhtifāʾ is also associated with possession by the jinn. To make Sayf disappear is to relinquish him to the state of possession by that which is makhfī (veiled) and appears only in specific contexts, namely, at night.Footnote 60 In this context, making Sayf disappear (ikhfāʾ) by declaring him majnūn and incarcerating him through neighborhood gossip and family “contacts” rather than through a psychiatric assessment is tied to possession's association with homosexuality as a condition of being consumed by one's own desire likened to the spirits. The alignment of majnūn with the makhfī—whose reason is veiled, according to Ibn Manzur—on the one hand, and of majnūn with the homosexual, on the other hand, characterizes Sayf's condition and its relation to the social. In this context, Foucault's reading of both homosexuality and madness intersects with popular and superstitious beliefs about possession as well as representations of ʿUdhri poets such as Majnun and Jamil. These associations complicate the representation of Sayf's sexuality by preventing its epistemological closure through a clear East/West, modern/premodern framework. Sayf disappears through a power network that involves the family, the neighborhood, and the state.
The narrator describes Sayf's return from the asylum, brandishing a medical report attesting to his sanity. This report, which Sayf shows to all those who gossiped about his madness and witnessed his abduction, is presented as proof of his cure. Thus, the public abduction is complemented by a public exoneration through an official report. When one of the neighbors, a teacher, sees it, he exclaims that Egyptians should have their national ID cards substituted for government-issued medical reports on their sanity.Footnote 61 The condition of sanity as opposed to madness thus arises as the condition of political subjectivity, wherein the family intervenes in and shapes the deployment of state power (the psychiatric institution). In this model, citizens are interpellated through models of psychonormativity, inextricable from heteronormativity. However, complicating the picture even further is a doctor's note accompanying Sayf's official attestation. Addressed to the family, the doctor writes that Sayf's true cure is not through institutionalization and psychiatric treatment but rather through a stable household and encourages his parents to marry him off immediately. The note exposes the failure of the psychiatric institution to cure Sayf, relegating the task to family power and its traditional “cure” of homosexuality within the confines of marriage. Upon reading the report, Sayf's mother ululates as the family decides to marry Sayf off to his cousin Nada. The doctor's note bypasses the Foucauldian asylum and its modern episteme, reverting instead to an “old-fashioned” cure that seeks to neutralize homosexuality's visibility, making it disappear in the arranged marriage. The novel exposes power's attempt to hide its own corruption—the drug dealing of Gamal, the older brother who orchestrates Sayf's ikhtifāʾ.
Associating homosexuality with madness, the novel exposes the complicity of family and state violence in suppressing homosexuality's public expression. When Sayf is taken away, the narrator imagines Sayf interacting with other mad people in the insane asylum. As in a movie scene, Sayf appears in the narrator's fantasy dressed all in white, his hair undone, being questioned (sīn jīm, interrogation) like a criminal in a police station by the asylum's staff.Footnote 62 Similar to Samir's questioning in the HIV clinic in London, the treatment of homosexuality (muʿālajat al-junūn) in Lusus operates as a fictionalization of social and political violence. This violence produces homosexuality through the sīn jīm as an illness requiring treatment and elimination. In Abu Golayyel's representation of homosexuality in this working-class context of the new ḥāra, one could read the deployment of conservative forces that seek to make homosexuality invisible. However, homosexuality arises not only as a target but also as a site of embodied resistance to the deployment of power's apparatus.
MAJNUN STRIKES BACK
Suppressing Sayf's homosexuality “cures” his madness and transforms him into a law-abiding, married subject. At another level, this suppression produces him as the heroic and tragic figure in the novel, overwhelmed by yet resisting various structures of violence. Reflecting on Sayf's ikhtifāʾ through abduction in broad daylight, the narrator claims that “Sayf wasn't insane. He wasn't mad nor was he narrow or shortsighted . . . He was simply a rebellious actor and a giddy lover [ʿāshiq walhān].”Footnote 63 Entering the “madmobile” in a highly visual and cinematic scene, Sayf pulls his tongue at his older brother, spits in his father's face, and insults his mother. Resisting the violence perpetrated against him, Sayf performs defiance and rebellion through bodily affects and invectives. In this way, he rejects the role he is forced to play. Characterizing Sayf as ʿāshiq walhān (ʿishq is the ideal form of homoerotic love in Arabic poetry),Footnote 64 the narrator marks the queer subject's rebellion as a denial of the apparatus of oppression's legitimacy. “Pulling his tongue,” “spitting,” and “swearing,” though they fail to rescue Sayf from his public punishment and incarceration, constitute sites of resistance to the violence of a normative interpellation that seeks to make him and his homosexuality disappear.
Sayf's body narrative and its affects operate not only to code homosexuality as a recognizable “species” as Foucault claims but also as a mad striking back that unsettles Arabic literary representations of homosexuality as well. Abu Golayyel frames this narratively through intertextual references to Najib Mahfuz's novels and Hassan al-Imam's filmic adaptation of Mahfuz's works.Footnote 65 In fact, the narrator describes Sayf as a character from al-Imam's films, performing rebellion in the contemporary setting of the ḥāra. Combining madness in the Arabic tradition and in Foucault's model with current articulations of a queer sexuality, Abu Golayyel presents Sayf as the only character in the novel forced into submission. Sayf as a rebellious actor serves to anchor the critique of political and social forms of disciplining in queer representations in modern Arabic literature and film. Just as al-Shaykh's character Samir could be compared to Majnun—the ʿUdhri poet accompanied by the animals—and to Klinger in MASH, Sayf is compared to the Mahfuzian hero in novels and film. The rebellion of the mad and homosexual Sayf is directed against the corruption of social and political authority and against the homosexual character's depiction as a marginal figure in modern Arabic novels. Depicting the trials of Sayf in this contemporary setting, Lusus enacts a break with this mode of representation. The character of the persecuted homosexual could no longer be organically situated in Mahfuz's ḥāra. The association of Sayf's sexuality with madness thoroughly complicates the Mahfuzian plot, thereby displacing its aesthetic framework and social and political context.
Focusing on the character Kirsha in Mahfuz's Midaq Alley, a married café owner who pursues young men, Frédéric Lagrange argues that “the homosexual in the contemporary Egyptian novel or short story is seldom a central figure, rather just another typical character of the popular ḥāra of Cairo.”Footnote 66 Kirsha's “typicality” is seamlessly incorporated into the social structure of the ḥāra. Though Kirsha is a marginal figure in Mahfuz's work from the 1950s, which Lagrange associates with the “contemporary Egyptian novel,” Kirsha causes scandal once he publically expresses his desire. When he entertains a local youth, inviting him to his café and spending nights with him outside the home, Kirsha becomes the object of physical violence. This occurs when his wife, Umm Husayn, attacks her husband's lover in public before turning against Kirsha, physically assaulting him and shaming him in front of the café customers and passersby. When Kirsha expresses his homosexuality publicly (yujhir bi-mā yusirruh), he incurs scorn and violence.Footnote 67 Mahfuz characterizes Kirsha as a “homosexual,” leaving the word in the Latin script.Footnote 68 In Mahfuz's novel, the public expression of homosexuality leads to scandal and violence.
The notion of yujhir or jahara (to express, speak out),Footnote 69 which is also used to describe “coming out” in contemporary Arabic discourse on homosexuality, is complementary with the notion of sirr (hidden, secret). This structure of visibility and invisibility reintroduces ikhtifāʾ as an articulation of a homosexuality that could only be veiled or practiced in secret (bi-l-sirr). This highlights as well the association of homosexuality with madness as a condition of veiling and unveiling of desire, from Jamil's declaration of love for Buthayna to Kirsha's expression of homosexuality in Mahfuz's novel. Here, the association of secrecy with revelation, suppression with expression, frames homosexuality in modern Arabic literature. However, and though both Kirsha and Sayf transgress social norms by expressing their queer desire in their respective environments, Kirsha is complicit with the structure of power in the Mahfuzian ḥāra. He is married, deals drugs, and owns a popular café. Whereas Sayf is coerced into marriage through violence, abduction, and institutionalization, which produce him as the mad one, in Kirsha's case the reference to madness is restricted to the wife, depicted as a majnūna (mad woman)Footnote 70 when she attacks her husband in public. Madness in Mahfuz's novel thus characterizes the wife's act of shaming her husband for his public expression of desire rather than Kirsha's homosexuality as such.
Associating homosexuality with madness and departing from the Mahfuzian narrative and the genre with which it is associated (“the contemporary Egyptian novel” and “modern Arabic literature” more generally), Abu Golayyel introduces a queer model of rebellion in his novel. While Innaha London presents Samir as a queer character in quest of sexual fulfillment and meaning in between Beirut and London, East and West, Sayf emerges in Lusus as a tragic figure who rebels against social and political institutions by exposing their complicity, violence, and corruption. Abu Golayyel's novel stages a new articulation of sexual identity and practices by rewriting and reframing the Mahfuzian plot and transposing its urban landscape into a contemporary social and political setting. Lusus thus allows us to move the debate about current articulations of Arab sexuality from modernity and tradition, East and West, and gay–lesbian identities and traditional Arab-Islamic structures of desire to a discussion of social, political, and aesthetic transformations arising from the contemporary novel.
CONCLUSION
The association of homosexuality with madness in the works I have examined in this article aligns the collapse of the state during Lebanon's civil war, and the condition of diaspora that this conflict produced, with the erosion of social and political legitimacy in Egypt. Both contexts highlight the advent of various forms of violence and displacement as a way of framing the articulation of queer desire. Dissident and “antisocial,” homosexuality is combated in order to veil the corruption and violence of the state and the family. While the aunt hits Samir and marries him off in Innaha London, in Lusus Gamal locks up Sayf and marries him off in an attempt to suppress the public expression of his homosexuality. In both cases, the family works in tandem with the state's “modern” institutions in order to assert a form of authority that keeps homosexuality in a state of ikhtifāʾ (disappearance) and the homosexual in a state of takhaffī (disguise). In this setting, the eroded legitimacy of the Arab state is inextricable from the corruption and moral bankruptcy of the “traditional” family.
Abu Golayyel's and al-Shaykh's narratives debunk the idealization of tradition (the Cairene ḥāra, the Arab family) as the repository of authenticity, morality, and resistance to Western hegemony and state power. Simultaneously, these novels unsettle the treatment of modernity as a homogeneous and hegemonic project that seamlessly regulates and produces Arab sexuality. The queer character in these texts resists modes of social and political normativity in Egypt, Lebanon, and England. Focusing on the affects of the queer character in the novels, one could read his madness not only as a framework for sexual articulation but also as a site of rebellion, transgression, and anger (mad as in “angry”) both within Arabic “traditional” settings and beyond them.
In the novels I discussed, Arab-Islamic forms of homosexual practices can no longer be considered authentic or a priori, resisting Western cultural and political hegemony from the 19th century onward. My reading demonstrates that a traditional form of Arab homosexuality, practiced within the confines of marriage, is in fact produced through forms of coercion and discourses arising from the diaspora, Beirut, and the modern-day, working-class Cairene ḥāra fictionalized in Abu Golayyel's work. Both Sayf and Samir are forced into the position of the “traditional” men-loving man or premodern sodomite—a married man who practices his homosexual desire in secret, at night, or in disguise. In Lusus and Innaha London, this sexual and social model and the very notion of “tradition” itself are produced and normalized through forms of ideological and physical violence perpetrated by the family and the state, both in Europe and in the Arab world. Thus my argument shifts the debate on queer Arab sexuality from the exclusive critique of European modernity and Western discursive practices to an investigation of this sexuality's production through a complex network of forms of authority, literary and cultural contexts, and ideologies.
The queer subjectivity emerging from al-Shaykh's and Abu Golayyel's works and the violence deployed to suppress it need to be read in relation to the social and political transformations that have gripped the Arab world from 2010 onward. Public expressions of desire, both sexual and political, embodied in Tahrir Square and staged in novels, expose the erosion of patriarchal authority, which could only maintain itself through modes of violence and corruption. To be specific, reading Lusus after the fall of Mubarak in Egypt, one could argue that the novel stages the corruption of the modern Arab state that is no longer tied to modernity as a clearly identifiable project emerging from the Enlightenment and mediated through colonialism and forms of intellectual and cultural exchange with Europe. Lusus emerges from the multiplication of critiques of corruption in Egypt, which gave rise to new configurations of social and political activism. This requires a complex investigation of the relation between the literary and the political as we engage Arab cultural production in light of ongoing social transformations.
