JMEWS Volume 7, Number 3, Fall 2011, Middle East Sexualities
This special issue of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies presents work representative of new studies of sexuality in the Middle East and highlights the fact that gender is an inescapable part of such studies. Introduced and edited by Dina al-Kassim and Lara Deeb, the issue includes research articles by Paul Amar, Pardis Mahdavi & Christine Sargent, and Jared McCormick, and a piece by Ghassan Makarem that bridges activist and scholarly writing to narrate the rise of HELEM, a Lebanese lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights organization. Amar’s article maps the discourses of masculininty studies in the Middle East, and tracks the ways that international human rights discourse has given rise to new instrumentalities of the security state. Mahdavi and Sargent draw on ethnographic research in the United Arab Emirates to provide a critique of global rhetoric on human trafficking and an analysis of the ways in which the assumptions of that rhetoric are taken up by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) directed to assist trafficked women, particularly in the context of the United Arab Emirates. Finally, McCormick provides an ethnographic investigation into the figure of the bear in Lebanon and Syria in order to analyze the ways in which hypermasculinity is deployed by various actors in relation to a growing gay tourism industry. The issue also includes book reviews of recent works that have emerged in the field and collectively demonstrate the growing importance of sexuality studies.
