litshop presents, danah alfailakawi “the abject queer: barelybeing nonhumans and deathworlds on the arabian peninsula”

presented by danah alfailakawi
predoctoral fellow, Literature Section at MIT

tuesday, december 5th @ 5:00pm
building 14, room 14E-304 (map)

abstract:

this talk is excerpted from the second chapter of a larger dissertation project titled “the abject queer: barelybeing, nonhumans, and deathworlds on the arabian peninsula.” the project redefines queerness as that which absorbs the violence necessary for the erection of subjectivity. turning to contemporary (twentyfirst century) literary and visual texts emerging from the arabian gulf (iraq, kuwait, bahrain, the united arab emirates, and yemen), i locate particular modes of abject queerness that make possible the cohesion of the postoil gulf subject, from the citizen to the family unit to the nation. in this chapter, i discuss the invisible bodies of predominantly male migrant workers in public spaces and the queer worlds that lie within the recesses of global racial capitalism. i engage with abu dhabian author deepak unnikrishnan’s novel temporary people (2017) in order to examine the migrant worker’s proximity to the nonhuman, as well as the modes of barelybeing and ungrievability that characterize racialized labor in the gulf today. i find that the body of the migrant worker gendered as masculine embodies a distinct variant of queerness, one that exiles him from the domestic realm within which the female migrant domestic worker is imprisoned. his deathworld is, alternatively, one that occupies the underbellies of streets, construction sites, warehouses, and buildings, feeding the manual construction of the region with his silent corpse.

bio:

danah alfailakawi is a sixth year phd candidate in the comparative literature department at the university of california, irvine, and a predoctoral fellow with the literature department at mit. she is a queer arab muslim and woman scholar, currently writing in a wintery new england worlds away from her native desert. her dissertation brings the fields of psychoanalysis, queer of color critique, and critical race theory to the literatures of the arabian peninsula, as she investigates modes of abject queerness in the region of the gulf.