| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Faced with the possible censoring of the film adaptation of ?Imarat Ya?qubyan, the book's author, ?Ala? al-Aswani, responded, "Why aren't Italy, France, or the United States defamed by movies dealing with homosexuality?" Implicit in his defensive question is a perceived distinction between First World gay rights and social conservatism in the Third World. My paper considers this conventional coupling of gay rights and civilizational discourse in the global reception of ?Imarat Ya?qubyan. Against the author's remarks, I argue that the story is remarkable for staging an interplay between the putatively opposed characters of Hatim Rashid, an openly gay newspaper editor, and Taha al-Shazli, a young man lured into a terrorist group. By uniting these two characters along parallel tracks, ?Imarat Ya?qubyan queerly couples the seemingly antagonistic forces endemic to the civilizational discourse of gay rights and offers us a means for imagining new constellations of queer politics.
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