Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Summer 2026

This project examines queer fictions in transnational Turkish and Arabic literatures as counter-archival formations that contest the nation-state and the neo-colonial gaze. This tension emerges through competing anxieties surrounding gender, sexuality, and national identity, limiting how queer and trans subjectivities can appear within dominant Turkish and Arabic literary histories. On the one hand, heteronational authoritarian states mobilize queer-and-transphobia to cast non-normative genders and sexualities as threats to national security. On the other hand, LGBTQI+ identities are mobilized within neo-colonial Western discourses that situate the region in need of liberal intervention, producing queer subjects only insofar as they conform to globally recognizable identitarian frameworks. These totalizing frameworks erase alternative modes of representing queer and trans lives across Middle Eastern and diasporic contexts. To counter this erasure, this project conceptualizes queer realism as a distinct literary genre driven by imagined forms of queer and trans aesthetic and political collectivity, creating alternative imaginaries and worldmaking. Examining Turkish, Syrian, and the Arab-American diasporic literatures through the works of Ceyhan Fırat, Zeynep Aksoy, Janset Karavin, Ahmad Danny Ramadan, and Zeyn Joukhadar, this project argues that queer realism emerges as a literary response to the crisis of imagining queer collectivity within both authoritarian nationalism and identitarian frameworks.