Brighton and Sussex Sexualities Network
BSSN
What is BSSN?
The Brighton and Sussex Sexualities Network (BSSN) is an inter-university research network aimed at supporting research and researchers who work on issues of human sexuality within the Universities of Brighton and Sussex and the wider Sussex area.The SOAS Centre for Gender Studies and the SOAS LGBT Society Jointly Present:
Technologies of Violence and Control:
Performing Arab Queer Communities Online
Wednesday 13 January, 7-9pm, SOAS, Khalili lecture Theatre
This colloquium seeks to examine the formation of Arab queer collectivities, challenging traditional modes of identity politics and embodiment. Taking cyberspace as a site of analysis, Noor Al-Qasimi and Barrak Alzaid examine the ways in which various organizations and institutions that purport to advance sexual democracy produce a form of identity politics that effectively engenders violence and control.
How to Do Things With Violence: The Transmission of Affect and Production of Politicized Queer Identities
Barrak Alzaid’s paper investigates the interplay between digital media and violence to create communities rooted in LGBT identity formations through an analysis of the Iraqi LGBT website, and the close reading of one embedded video depicting the torture of a trans person in Iraq. The paper employs a methodology that combines a reflexive analysis of the author's process of witnessing and translation of the author's, coupled with a performative analysis of the work the video enacts.
Bio
An academic, activist and artist- B. A. Alzaid explores gender and sexuality in the Middle East and its diaspora, including the formation of LGBT activist communities, the transmission of affect in digital media, and violence as a creative force. Alzaid's art and activist work ranges from film and performance to community based initiatives on wealth redistribution and food justice. Ladies and Gentlemen, Boyahs and Girls: Uploading Transnational Queer Subjectivities in the United Arab Emirates Al-Qasimi’s paper focuses on how queer narratives on social networking sites (namely, Facebook) are accommodated and/or denied by laws pertaining to the governance of sexuality. Ultimately, she asks, to what extent does the Emirati national youth’s articulation of queerness transcend and transform collective sexual norms governed by the Emirati nationalist paradigm, allowing for the emergence of a transnational sexual politics that both destablizes sexual governance and reconstitutes the sovereignty of the nation state?
Bio
Noor Al-Qasimi received her Ph.D. in Film and Television from the University of Warwick in 2008. She recently held a research fellowship at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University and was also a teaching fellow in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU. She will be a research fellow at the Centre of Gender Studies at SOAS from January-August 20010. Her research interests include critical theory, postcolonial feminism, transnational feminism, gender and sexuality in the Middle East, queer theory, feminist theories of agency, popular/visual culture and new media in the Persian/Arab Gulf region, biopolitics, governmentality, and affect theory.
