“We Must Write”: Negotiating Visibility in a Feminist Queer Counterpublic

• In Event: Communicating Through Censorship: Creative Agency in Transnational Perspective

Abstract

This paper traces the media history of Meem, a Beirut-based feminist queer collective that was active between 2007 and 2014. Through interviews with members of the collective, I show how private and public media practices – including personal messaging and email correspondence, blogging, zine-creation and editing, translation, digital protest mobilization, and the making of protest signs – have conditioned and shaped the emergence of a distinctly local feminist and queer discourse and counterpublic. Looking in particular at the politics of visibility across these forms of mediation, I argue that the degrees of opacity and anonymity afforded by digital media technologies have enabled the circulation of non-conforming genders and sexualities in the normative public sphere.

Author

• Sara Mourad, American U of Beirut