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 […]