By looking at the operation of the foreign donor community in Egypt, local comprador NGOs and missionizing Western development practitioners a material infrastructure is revealed that is invested in repressing other cases of ‘freedom’ such that El Mahdy’s appear as indigenous.īoth Plato’s dialogues, as ancient literary philosophy, and Kafka’s stories, as modern philosophical literature, incorporate divine revelation as part of a dialectical dissection of values. This paper traces the infrastructure that is necessary for such an interpellation and the repression of other cases of ‘freedom’ such that this instance become possible. Yet El Mahdy’s interprelation of the ‘political’ and ‘freedom’ is not germane nor is it as seamless as the West makes it seem, contrary to Sweden’s asylum standards which do not include Syrians or Iraqi fleeing the region. El Mahdy’s body becomes an articulation of how this freedom is imbricated with the West’s own contradictions when it comes to balancing rhetoric of openness and the question of Arab refugees. In that instance a racialized other that lacks ‘freedom’ and ‘political’ awareness is performed. In this liberation the West is rendered as the guardian of ‘freedom’. Both instances are part of the continued fascination of Western feminism’s desire to liberate individuals of a lower racial hierarchy as an act that defines both the ‘political’ and as a corollary ‘freedom’. This latest expose was part of El Mahdy’s work with Femen, the Ukranian based feminist group. In the comfort of Sweden in 2014, Alia El Mahdy posted pictures of her nude body once again, bleeding on the flag of the Islamic State. This bellow for ‘freedom’, and the subsequent outcry against it, allowed her to put forward an application for ‘political’ asylum in Sweden which was swiftly granted. In 2011, in the wake of Egypt’s uprising, an Egyptian self-styled feminist by the name of Alia El Mahdy decided to post pictures of herself nude on her Facebook page in an act of ‘freedom’. Attending to their textual and cultural dynamics, this paper will discuss the implications of these books for a queer re-imagining of the transcultural that can be deconstructed through the world(s) of genre. Ultimately, I will discuss how these texts are part of a growing corpus of cultural memory that destabilize static borders, often through narrative and genre devices that foreground liminality. Puar’s description of ‘perverse racialized bodies’ to read the multitude of ways that perversion can be read, understood, and displaced to create what Díaz calls a kind of narrative counterspell. This paper will examine the legacies of those transcultural and transhistorical migrations, linking with Jabir K. As José Esteban Muñoz tells us, ‘the here and now is a prison house’, and through the spectre of past and future, their bodies become constrained along axes that are simultaneously theoretical, cultural, and textual. A symbolic marking of queer individuals (using the expanded definition utilized by Judith Butler and others) is aligned with a literal one, becoming apparent through the movements made by the books’ characters. These genre novels show how migrations disrupt conceptualizations of identity and citizenship across transcultural borders. This paper will examine the representation of movement in, and around, queer bodies exemplified in texts such as Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008) and Vu Tran’s Dragonfish (2016).
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