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VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//UIC
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:2026051711405220240411T15000020240411T1630006a0a5204b7b4d@uic.edu
CATEGORIES:MEETING
STATUS:TENTATIVE
DTSTAMP:20240221T104339
DTSTART:20240411T150000
DTEND:20240411T163000
SUMMARY:Book Talk and Discussion with Mejdulene Bernard Shomali on Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives
DESCRIPTION:Join the Arab American Cultural Center and the Global Middle East Studies Working Group in a book talk and discussion with Mejdulene Bernard Shomali of her book Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives.    About Author: Mejdulene Bernard Shomali is a queer Palestinian poet and an associate professor in Gender, Women?s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she is also the program coordinator for Arab and Muslim American Studies. Her poetry can be read in Copper Nickel, Tinderbox, Diode Press, The Pinch Journal, Mizna, and elsewhere. She has published articles in Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the US, the Journal of Middle East Women?s Studies, and several edited collections. Her first book, Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives is available from Duke University Press. Her  poetry chapbook ?agriculture of grief: prayers for my father?s dementia? is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (August 2024).    About the Book: In Between Banat Mejdulene Bernard Shomali examines homoeroticism and nonnormative 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 women?s futures, she draws on the transliterated term ?banat??the Arabic word for girls?to refer to women, femmes, and nonbinary people who disrupt stereotypical and Orientalist representations of the ?Arab woman.?    ?Mejdulene Bernard Shomali?s Between Banat will shatter everything you ever imagined you wanted out of a queer archive. Rejecting hetero-Orientalist binaries, Between Banat creates an epistemology of ?between??a generative way of being, knowing, and desiring that constantly moves toward joyful freedom by sidestepping demands for legibility and authenticity. Theorizing intimacy outside of hetero- and homonormative frameworks, Between Banat is a long-awaited, lyrical love letter that invites us to forge collective, liberatory, queer Arab futures.? ? Amira Jarmakani, author of An Imperialist Love Story: Desert Romances and the War on Terror    Event is co-sponsored by The Gender and Women's Studies Department, the Gender and Sexuality Center and the Institute for the Humanities    Space is accessible by wheelchair. For other questions, email us at arabamcc@uic.edu  | Event post: https://arabamcc.uic.edu/events?page_id=2213
LOCATION:101 Taft Hall 826 S Halsted St  Chicago IL 60607
CLASS:PRIVATE
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