Local, Regional and Transnational Queer-feminist Arab, Muslim, and People of Color Insurgent-Abolitionist Horizons

Abstract

How can radical queer-feminist contestations of the longstanding disciplining and punishment of women, trans peoples, and gender dissidents elucidate the blast radius of the multiple, dynamic, intersectional ‘cages’ that define the daily conditions of racialized gendered-queer life that require obliterating? I examine the notion of capitalist and authoritarian nation-state ‘cages’ that punitively condemns racialized queer-feminist lives in the decolonial context of gender-based sexual harassment in Egypt and the inspiring autonomous and lateral anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist initiative that some of my queer-feminist Egyptian and Muslim fieldwork participants incepted to combat harassment in an ongoing post-revolutionary Egyptian ‘Arab Spring/Islamist Winter.’ My participants did not rely on state-discipline and carceral punishment mechanisms nor did they seek to replicate the reproduction of patriarchal violence towards abusers. Rather, through knowledge production (al-intag al-marify) they sought a more compassionate-transformative justice approach in combatting harassment that centered on illuminating harassment as a micro-fascistic cis-heteropatriarchal by-product emergent from macro-fascistic statist and capitalist structural hierarchies and inequities that cyclically reify each other at the vertical and horizontal level. Even prior to a covet19-viral laden world, they recognized that there is nowhere left to hide (if there ever was one for innumerable disenfranchised racialized/queered/feminized/classed/disabled/debilitated lives marked and targeted by a necro-politics of death. They gesture towards a non-ideological revolutionary driven ethics and politics that demands that we must all ask how we will collectively decide how live or die. They reject playing to a statist-politics of recognition, reform and rights, or recourse to martial and emergency laws that are contingent on and reify capitalist-state paradigms that (further) strips and extinguishes our communitarian and individual agency as a species. Instead, they argue for a politics of responsibility that focuses on interconnecting the burning ashes, timbres, and fires of our intersecting local, regional, and transnational struggles through mutual aid and social solidarity towards each other and nonhuman life.