Beginnings: first Queering Islam blog post

I’m rather excited to be writing my first post for my new blog entitled Queering Islam, and which is part of my Leverhulme-funded project Queer Diasporas: Islam, Homosexuality and a Micropolitics of Dissent, based at the University of Leicester. Here you will find blog posts about my ongoing research and commentary on current events involving queer diasporas and/or Islam. This is the ideal place to check on how my project is developing and to contribute with your comments, so please feel free to join the conversation if you have any useful suggestions.

To inaugurate my blog, I’m adding a link to the post I wrote for the School of English blog soon after starting my project, also alluding to ‘beginnings’. (Please click on the link above, and extra kudos to whoever’s guessed that the title of the post is a reference to Edward Said’s book.) Said’s work has been instrumental to my thinking for a number of years now: his incisive critique of the way the West perceives and shapes the Orient, despite its foreclosing of any potential resistance from the West itself, is as current today as it was when he published it; as is his work on how the Western media conditions public opinion regarding Islam and Muslims, inexorably pitting Western citizens against a singular ‘Islam’ misguidedly perceived as holistic and coherent.

Please keep checking the blog, and happy reading!