This book provides a vivid account of the political valence of weaving queer into native positionality and the struggle for decolonisation in the settler colonial context of Palestine, referred to as decolonial queering. It discusses how processes of gender and sexuality that privilege hetero-colonising authority shaped and continue to define both the Israeli-Zionist conquest of Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation, thus future imaginings of free Palestine. This account emerges directly from the voices and experiences of Palestinian activists and artists; particularly, it draws on fieldwork with Palestine’s most established queer grassroots movement, alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, and a variety of artistic Palestinian productions (photography, fashion, music, performance, and video art). Offering a comprehensive and in-depth engagement with the situated context, history, and local practices of Palestinian queerness, scholars, students, and activists across (de)colonial, race, and gender/sexuality studies would appreciate its unique insights; its empirical focus also reaches to those academics in the wider fields of Middle Eastern, anthropological, and political studies.

After Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush declared, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Bush’s assertion was not simply jingoist bravado—it encapsulates the civilizationalist moralism that has motivated and defined the United States since its beginning, linking the War on Terror to the nation’s settlement and founding. In Queer Terror, C. Heike Schotten offers a critique of U.S. settler-colonial empire that draws on political, queer, and critical indigenous theory to situate Bush’s either/or moralism and reframe the concept of terrorism. The categories of the War on Terror exemplify the moralizing politics that insulate U.S. empire from critique, render its victims deserving of its abuses, and delegitimize resistance to it as unthinkable and perverse. Schotten provides an anatomy of this moralism, arguing for a new interpretation of biopolitics that is focused on sovereignty and desire rather than racism and biology. This rethinking of biopolitics puts critical political theory of empire in dialogue with the insights of both native studies and queer theory. Building on queer theory’s refusal of sanctity, propriety, and moralisms of all sorts, Schotten ultimately contends that the answer to Bush’s ultimatum is clear: dissidents must reject the false choice he presents and stand decisively against “us,” rejecting its moralism and the sanctity of its “life,” in order to further a truly emancipatory, decolonizing queer politics.

A debut novel that tells the story of Rasa, a young gay man coming of age in the Middle East Set over the course of twenty-four hours, Guapa follows Rasa, a gay man living in an unnamed Arab country, as he tries to carve out a life for himself in the midst of political and social upheaval. Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. One night Rasa's grandmother — the woman who raised him — catches them in bed together. The following day Rasa is consumed by the search for his best friend Maj, a fiery activist and drag queen star of the underground bar, Guapa, who has been arrested by the police. Ashamed to go home and face his grandmother, and reeling from the potential loss of the three most important people in his life, Rasa roams the city’s slums and prisons, the lavish weddings of the country’s elite, and the bars where outcasts and intellectuals drink to a long-lost revolution. Each new encounter leads him closer to confronting his own identity, as he revisits his childhood and probes the secrets that haunt his family. As Rasa confronts the simultaneous collapse of political hope and his closest personal relationships, he is forced to discover the roots of his alienation and try to re-emerge into a society that may never accept him.

What if our understanding of Israel/Palestine has been wrong all along?

Decolonial Imaginaries in Palestinian Experimental Film and Video focuses on an underexamined group of female Palestinian filmmakers, highlighting their relevance for thinking through a diverse set of issues relating to decolonial aesthetics, post-nationalism and gender, non-Western ecologies, trauma and memory, diasporic experiences of space, biopolitics, feminist historiography and decolonial temporalities. Positing that these filmmaker-artists radically counter dominant media images of Palestinians, deessentializing Palestinian identity while opening up history and the present to new potentialities and ways of imagining Palestinian futures, Decolonial Imaginaries in Palestinian Experimental Film and Video argues that Palestinian experience is urgently relevant to all of us. As the works address issues of food availability and land use, environmental collapse and forced displacement, Hole explores how such films generate hope, imagine impossible possibilities and offer inspiration and wisdom when it comes to losing and rebuilding. Addressing a fundamentally transnational and understudied area, this book will resonate with readers working in the areas of film and media studies, Palestinian cultural studies, historiography, Middle East studies and experimental film.

The Global Trajectories of Queerness interrogates the term “queer” by closely mapping what space the theorizing of same-sex sexualities and sexual politics in the non-West inhabits. From theoretical discussions around the epistemologies of such conceptualizations of space in the Global South, to specific ethnographies of same-sex culture, this collection hopes to forge a way of tracking the histories of race, class, caste, gender, and sexual orientation that form what is called the moment of globalization. The volume, co-edited by Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala, asks whether the societies of the Global South simply borrow and graft an internationalist (read Euro-US) language of LGBT/queer rights and identity politics, whether it is imposed on them or whether there is a productive negotiation of that language. Contributing Authors: Sruti Bala, Laia Ribera Cañénguez, Soledad Cutuli, Roderick Ferguson, Iman Ganji, Krystal Ghisyawan, Josephine Ho, Neville Hoad, Victoria Keller, Haneen Maikey, Shad Naved, Guillermo Núñez Noriega, Stella Nyanzi, Witchayanee Ocha, Julieta Paredes, Mikki Stelder, Ashley Tellis, and Wei Tingting

"A Land With A People began as a storytelling project of Jewish Voice for Peace-New York City and subsequently transformed into a theater project performed throughout the New York City area. A Land With A People elevates rarely heard Palestinian and Jewish voices and visions. It brings us the narratives of secular, Muslim, Christian, and LGBTQ Palestinians who endure the particular brand of settler colonialism known as Zionism. It relays the transformational journeys of Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Palestinian and LGBTQ Jews who have come to reject the received Zionist narrative. Unflinching in their confrontation of the power dynamics that underlie their transformation process, these writers find the courage to face what has happened to historic Palestine, and to their own families as a result. Stories touch hearts, open minds, and transform our understanding of the "other"-as well as comprehension of our own roles and responsibilities. A Land With a People emerges from this reckoning. Contextualized by a detailed historical introduction and timeline charting 150 years of Palestinian and Jewish resistance to Zionism, this collection will stir emotions, provoke fresh thinking, and point to a more hopeful, loving future-one in which Palestine/Israel is seen for what it is in its entirety, as well as for what it can be"--

For at least a decade, university foreign language programs have been in decline throughout the English-speaking world. As programs close or are merged into large multi-language departments, disciplines such as German studies find themselves struggling to survive. Transverse Disciplines offers an overview of the current research on the humanities and the academy at large and proposes creative and courageous ideas for the university of the future. Using German studies as a case study, the book examines localized academic work in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States in order to model new ideas for invigorated thinking beyond disciplinary specificity, university communities, and entrenched academic practices. In essays that are theoretical, speculative, experimental, and deeply personal, contributors suggest that German studies might do better to stop trying to protect existing national and disciplinary arrangements. Instead, the discipline should embrace feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial academic practices and commitments, including community-based work, research-creation, and scholar activism. Interrogating the position of researchers, teachers, and administrators inside and outside academia, Transverse Disciplines takes stock of the increasingly tenuous position of the humanities and stakes a claim for the importance of imagining new disciplinary futures within the often restrictive and harmful structures of the academy.

Queer studies is now a rapidly expanding field, as scholars from a variety of disciplines seek to address the long-running marginalisation of queer perspectives and experiences. But there has so far been little effort to unify the study of queer communities outside the West, and much of the current writing views these communities through a narrowly Western lens. Building on the work of the annual Queer Asia conference, which the editors helped to establish, this collection represents the most comprehensive work to date on queer studies in an Asian context. Featuring case studies and original research from across the continent, covering the Middle East, South and East Asia, and Asian diasporas, the collection offers a genuinely pan-Asian perspective which places queer Asian identities and movements in dialogue with each other, rather than within a Western framework. By considering how queerness is imagined within plural Asian experiences and contexts, the contributors show a that re-envisioning of 'queer' through Asian perspectives has the potential to challenge existing discourses and debates in the wider field of contemporary gender, sexuality, and queer studies.