Queer Visual Practices of Southwest Asia North Africa

Queer visual practices of Southwest Asia North Africa are achieving unparalleled global visibility in the 21st century. However, increased visibility is not equivalent to nuanced perspectives, recognition of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, or embodiment of methods and practices from Global Souths. This panel seeks to answer arising and ongoing questions about queerness in material and visual cultures from the SWANA region, such as how artists and visual creators negotiate invisibility and hyper visibility, cultural relativism, and social norms, and histories and present experiences, within the “glocal.” Kina and Bernabe contend that “the very real material and political stakes of representation and misrepresentation” are in operation whenever scholarship aims to ask difficult questions not only through [queer] content and analysis, but also through considering the meanings and circumstances that permit or encourage coalescence around certain topics (4). This panel seeks to discuss these new frameworks for queer[ed] artistic and cultural practices in a SWANA, Middle Eastern, and Arab context.

To queer is to work at an angle to, or sideways, as in crossing (Sedgwick, xii); to be queer is to embody or identify with this approach. Neither in direct agreement nor direct opposition with dominant norms, queerness exposes the reification of hegemony bound up within binaries and offers alternatives. This panel investigates how art can use approaches that exist at these sideways intersections by drawing on anti-assimilationist modalities such as queer, feminist, and decolonial theory, to foreground queerness, deviance, perversity and the like in queer visual practices from the SWANA region.