The Queer Arab Glossary: A Book Launch with Marwan Kaabour

To celebrate the release of by">span>by Marwan Kaabour, the first published collection of queer Arabic slang, the author, artists, and contributors join in discussion at the Museum, with copies of the book available for purchase.

Author Marwan Kaabour, illustrator Haitham Haddar, and editor Suneela Mubayi join scholars and writers Maya Mikdashi and Hussein Omar to launch the groundbreaking work with a conversation on the power of queer vernacular, fluid notions of language and queerness, diaspora, identity politics, and everything in between.

">span> is the first published collection of Arabic LGBTQ+ slang. This bold guide captures the lexicon of the queer Arab community in all its differences, quirks and felicities. Featuring fascinating facts and anecdotes, it contains more than 300 terms in both English and Arabic, ranging from the humorous to the harrowing, serious to tongue-in-cheek, pejorative to endearing. Here, leading queer Arab artists, academics, activists and writers offer insightful essays situating this groundbreaking glossary in a modern social and political context.

Marwan Kaabour is a graphic designer, artist and writer. His interdisciplinary practice builds pathways between communication and publication design, curation, pedagogy and political activism. In 2019, Marwan founded Takweer, an online platform and expanding archive of queer narratives in Arab history and popular culture. He has worked with leading cultural institutions, including the V&A Museum, Phaidon, Art Basel, The National Gallery, Thames & Hudson, Serpentine Galleries, Hayward Gallery, Zaha Hadid Foundation and The Mosaic Rooms. He designed the Rihanna book, which was named as one of Time magazine's best photo books of 2019.

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Haitham Haddad is a visual artist from Palestine whose work examines the political relationships between historical and contemporary manifestations of myth and folklore. Working across mixed-media, printmaking, illustration, video, and tattooing, he seeks to contest ways of perception, seeing, listening, and imagining.

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Maya Mikdashi is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her work focuses on state and archival power, sexual and political difference, and law, religion, and secularism. Her first book, Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism and the State in Lebanon (SUP, 2022), won the 2023 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology at the AAA, the Fatima Mernissi Book Award and AMEWS Book Prize at MESA, the LGBTQ Caucus book award at the ISA, and received honorable mention in the Michelle Rosaldo Book Prize given by the Association for Feminist Anthropology at the AAA. Maya sits on the editorial collectives of the Journal of Palestine Studies and Social Text, and is a co-founding editor of Jadaliyya. Maya’s work has been translated into and published in Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, Spanish, French, German, Korean, and Portuguese.

Suneela Mubayi is a translator between Arabic, Urdu and English, independent scholar, and writer of mixed descent, whose interests stand at the juncture where language, the body, and poetry intersect. She completed a PhD in Arabic literature from NYU in 2018 on vagabond poets in Arabic poetry. She has translated close to 100 essays, poems, and fiction pieces for publications such as Banipal, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, Jadaliyya, Mada Masr, and Modern Poetry in Translation. She was the joint recipient of a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and likes linguistic puns, Iraqi maqam and Syrian TV serials.

Hussein Omar is a cultural and intellectual historian of the Modern Middle East and is currently an AHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Pembroke College and the History Faculty, as part of the 'First World War and Global Religions’ project. Omar formerly taught global and Middle East history at University College Dublin and the University of Oxford. He now writes on cemeteries, sexuality and psychoanalysis, among other things.

CART Captioning will be provided for this event.

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