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Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives Mejdulene Bernard Shomali (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023). 224 pp. $25.95 paper. ISBN: 9781478019275
Between Banat is a search for queer ancestors and queer futures. Both searches—for queer Arab ancestors and queer Arab futures—are driven by a pivotal question: “What would it mean to be queer, Arab, and OK?” (p. 138). Mejdulene Bernard Shomali seeks answers in community histories and archives, exploring how queer Arab women, banāt, and femmes are represented (or erased) and how they represent themselves. Moving between languages, genres, and temporalities, the book examines diverse texts ranging from popular golden-era Egyptian cinema to contemporary Arab American novels, from activist-published autobiographical writing to graphic novels, films, apparel, and print produced in multiple Arab geographies and diasporas. By juxtaposing these diverse texts and analyzing them through the lens of “queer Arab critique,” Shomali assembles a transnational Arab archive that centers on women's desires and narratives and showcases works that resist erasure, insist on presence, and enable queer joy and pleasure.
Queer Arab critique is a much-needed framework, which at once ruptures the normative discourses that shape and confine Arab women's sexualities, diligently excavates the traces of queer banāt in Arab cultural production, and offers a road map for building a free, joyful, and pleasurable queer Arab future. Shomali positions banāt—a transliterated term that refers to women, femmes, and nonbinary people—at the core of this study for a few critical reasons. First, banāt challenge the idealized Arab femininity that is “patriotic, reproductive, elitist, and anti-Black” (p. 30). Through her in-depth examination of the figure of Scheherazade in the renowned tale of The Thousand and One Nights and in contemporary Arab American literature (Chapter 1),...