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Podcast: New Books in Gender
Episode: Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, "Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives" (Duke UP, 2023)
Description: In Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (Duke UP, 2023), Mejdulene Bernard Shomali examines homoeroticism and non-normative sexualities between Arab women in transnational Arab literature, art, and film. Moving from The Thousand and One Nights and the Golden Era of Egyptian cinema to contemporary novels, autobiographical writing, and prints and graphic novels that imagine queer Arab futures, Shomali uses what she calls queer Arab critique to locate queer desire amid heteronormative imperatives. Showing how systems of heteropatriarchy and Arab nationalisms foreclose queer Arab womenâs futures, she draws on the transliterated term âbanatââthe Arabic word for girls...