New York University 4 credits Arab Crossroads Studies
What is Gender? What is Sexuality? What do they have to do with biological sex or sex-acts? This course examines different gender and sexual identities in the Arabic speaking world, and the social, political and cultural contingencies that gave rise to them. All identities are always-already gendered. We begin with the basic concepts, theories and controversies that underpin this claim. We then grapple with the diversity of ways in which Arab cultures have constructed and performed genders and sexualities through notions of marriage, fertility, same-sex love and desire, masculinity and femininity, and how these constructions intersected with race, class, morality, respectability, piety, and other norms of ideal or acceptable social behaviour. Our sources include cartoons and advertising, pre-Islamic poetry, the modern Arabic novel, postcolonial civil codes, Islamic jurisprudence, autobiography and film. From the construction of Arab genders and sexualities we move to how genders and sexualities have, in turn, powerfully constituted Arab identities and societies: from literary and artistic canons like Orientalism to the colonization of Algeria in 1832 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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