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Queer Islam and New Historicism

Landry, Donna (2011) Queer Islam and New Historicism. Queer Adventures in Cultural Studies, 25 (2). pp. 149-165. (doi:10.1080/09502386.2011.535983) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:55499)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.
Official URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.535983

Abstract

You will remember that the project of largely American ‘New Historicism’ was committed to uncovering the repressed of texts, to unravelling Foucauldian genealogies in all their thick descriptiveness. Judith Butler leapt fully formed from Foucault's multi-volume history of sexuality, claiming that there was no such thing as ‘a sexuality’ or a ‘gender identity’ that existed before its production in discourse, and in the body experienced, performed, and analysed as a material and thus also discursive field. This essay will read into one another new work on the history of sexuality within Islamic cultures, in which a certain queering of the historical record takes place, and novelistic representations of subjectivity and embodied experience within Islam, in which a certain queering of consciousness takes place. What is revealed as ‘the difference of Islam’, I shall argue, is that everyday life is often represented as happening within the theological panopticon. Islam appears to be experienced as a particularly intense set of gazes marking what I will call an enfolded subjectivity. And yet this difference is far from an absolute one. There may be common affects represented even where sexual practices and their epistemological grids differ. What one must remain alert to is that the very mapping of identity onto sexuality both may and yet may not be happening according to Western preconceptions of this process.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1080/09502386.2011.535983
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PE English philology and language
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Depositing User: Kate Smith
Date Deposited: 18 May 2016 10:07 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:22 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/55499 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Landry, Donna.

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