Introduction

For this special issue of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, we set out to review and reflect upon the status of sexuality in Middle East studies. In the process we began to realize that gender is an inescapable part of this discussion and that the distinctions we inherit from feminist and queer theory conceived within the North/South divide must be transformed when considering the Middle East or the global South more broadly. We must consider gender, then, within the entanglements of sex and sex endowed with gender. This realignment along the political and epistemological axes of our material examples is perfectly consistent with the insights of Michel Foucault (1980), who, in a 1977 interview, recalled that Western feminism had in the nineteenth century recentered its political claims on labor, rights, and the political economy of gender rather than on sexuality, feeling, and the sentimentality of the private sphere, which had been the localities of femininity. Likewise, gay rights were born out of a hyper visibility of the sexual—not for an essential reason but because the social taboo on representing gay male sexuality was the modality of power. To change this, sexual visibility became the crux of social justice claims in the gay rights movement, but, as we have seen within our lifetimes, the tactics, issues, and modalities of sexual dissent have shifted from a focus on visibility and representation into a host of overlapping projects of freedom that have disseminated gay rights into kinship, citizenship, and property that are entangled with gender and that complicate traditional conceptions of human rights by challenging the prevailing power to define the human and its relations.

In the pathbreaking study Women with Moustaches, Men without Beards, Afsaneh Najmabadi (2005) exposes the interconnections between modernist projects of nation making in the Middle East and gendered conceptions of sexuality to argue that modern gender and sexuality have a common origin in national imaginations of the norm and its deviance. The modern nation state comes into being in part through its cultivation of gender and sexuality—both as a repressed cost of modernity and as a newly activated homophobia. Najmabadi's work probes the question of feminist lineages within sexuality studies especially where influenced by queer theory. In this issue, we review Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900, Dror Ze'evi's (2006) equally pioneering study of the Ottoman construction of sexuality and gender through a diverse set of discourses from medicine to literature; this work covers three centuries of the discursive production of modern gender and sexuality by means of scientific, cultural, and juridical knowledges. Both these histories clarify a multivalent conversation between East and West, North and South that cannot be reduced to mere influence or importation of Western science and social attitudes. Rather, these discourses emerge coevally to affect subject constitution, notions of desire and communitarian practice; works like Najmabadi's and Ze'evi's corroborate the dissemination of the discourse of sexuality in the development of the modern biopolitical state in the Middle East. In doing so, they contest the view, popular even among some scholars, that contemporary forms of sexual identity are inherently alien to the Middle East by demonstrating a wide array of evidence indicating that biopolitics is a global affair. Their work heightens our conviction that we need more material studies to discover the specificities of Middle East subjective constitution under the modern state form.

Ghassan Makarem's contribution exemplifies the complex negotiation between local and global discourses traced by the feminist historiographies of Najmabadi and Ze'evi. Makarem's narrative of the rise of HELEM, a Lebanese lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights organization, is deeply inflected by the theoretical debates both past and present that are now standard fare in transnational queer studies; however, his account dissolves imaginary boundaries between activist and scholarly writing to show that HELEM does not flatly import an alien theory to a local context but that subjects in action rework identities, concepts, and theoretical models in situ and as a direct response to specific juridical, historical, and theological exigencies of...