CDTS Speaker Series: Professor Andrew Gayed

Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art

Please join us as Prof. Andrew Gayed, PhD, discusses his new book, Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art, published with the University of Washington Press. In it he interrogates the performances of queerness, Arabness, and their intersections by reflecting on modern sexual identity, its relationship to colonialism, and how contemporary queer visual artists disrupt linear identity narratives. Premodern archives from the Middle East show rich and diverse homoerotic worlds that were disrupted by the colonial imposition of Western models of sexuality. Prof. Gayed traces how contemporary Arab and Middle Eastern diasporic artists have remembered and reinvented these historical ways of being in their work in order to imagine a different present. In focusing on the diaspora in North America and Europe, this research emphasizes themes of migration, displacement, transnationalism, and examines how queerness is performed within artistic practice and how culturally diverse contemporary artists operate within the context of the West. Prof. Gayed focuses on analyzing visual art by Jamil Hellu, Ebrin Bagheri, 2Fik, Laurence Rasti, Nilbar Güres, Alireza Shojaian, and others.