Queer Modernities and Diasporic Art of the Middle East

This thesis investigates Middle Eastern diasporic artists in North America who are creating political art about queer identity. This doctoral project explores colonial contact zones to discuss queer identity in relation to politically motivated art being produced by the Middle Eastern diaspora and provides nuance and contributes to the growing scholarship on Middle Eastern contemporary art and cultural studies. I consider whether social scientists, cultural theorists, and historians can reach a narrative of Western and non-Western Modernity that works beyond sexual oppression (Middle East) versus sexual acceptance (North America), and instead examines a negotiation of diasporic sexuality. Arguing instead that diasporic subjects create an alternative coming-out narrative and identity script to inscribed Western models, the aim is to see the ways in which local instances of homosociality cite pre-Modern sexuality scripts within contemporary Middle Eastern art and its diaspora, and reject Western queer identity narratives that become exclusionary in non-Western contexts. By incorporating different sociological strategies in the analysis of contemporary art, this research strives to make self-identification categories less dichotomous and more expansive. This doctoral thesis examines how the artworks of Arab artists in the diaspora illustrate diasporic queer identities that are different from the global-to-local homocolonialism of Western gay identity, and provides examples of how local networks of identity are transmitted through visual language and how alternative sexuality scripts are written within transnational contexts.

Examining the artworks of diasporic contemporary artists Jamil Hellu, Ebrin Bagheri, and 2fik (Toufique), I explore the concept of multiple Modernisms and their relationship to displacement, trauma, and Arab sexualities/masculinities within a postcolonial and anti-imperialist framework. Jamil Hellu uses photography, video, performance, and mixed-media art installations to create contrasting metaphors about the politics of cultural identities and the fluidity of sexuality. Ebrin Bagheris ink and paper drawings evoke histories of pre-modern, same-sex desires in Iranian culture. 2Fik uses his own diasporic identity as a subject in his work to explore the dichotomies of his Canadian-Moroccan culture and his lived experience as a queer Arab.