Middle East Studies

Writing Queer / Queer Writing: Diasporic Dialogues between the Middle East and Brazil

event poster

Friday, November 13, 2020

12:00 – 1:30 p.m.

Virtual event. Registration required.

A collaboration between the Center for Middle East Studies, the Brazil InitiativePortuguese and Brazilian Studies, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies,  and the Pembroke Center.

Join us for a roundtable conversation with and between queer writers from Brazil, Natalia Borges Polesso and Cidinha da Silva, and from the Middle East, Raphael Khouri and Saleem Haddad. The four writers will be in discussion with the Director of the Center for Middle East Studies Nadje Al-Ali, and the head of the Brazil Initiative Jeremy Lehnen.

What does it mean to be a queer writer in a context of increasing authoritarianism?  What spaces, both literal and figurative, have opened up and shrunk in the writers’ respective contexts? How does literature enable the writers to address questions differently/different questions than may otherwise be possible? What is the power of the literary arts in our current socio-political conjecture?   Do you see yourself and your writing as part of a diaspora...a queer diaspora?


This event is part of a larger initiative between the Center for Middle East Studies and the Brazil Initiative at Brown to bring feminist and queer writers, academics, and activists into conversation.


 

Lectures
Gender