Sexual Policing from Colonial Wars to Culture Wars: A SWANA Feminist Approach

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel attends to the methods, inquiries, and new directions in critical SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) studies, with a particular focus on feminist and queer analysis, at the moment of late-stage U.S. empire. Drawing from the contributions of scholars on race, sexuality, and imperiality, such as McClintock (1995), Puar and Rai (2002), and Jarmakani (2015), this paper session foregrounds an analytic of sexuality broadly defined within the histories and processes of SWANA-American racial subject formation, imperial and colonial domination and resistance, and domestic ‘culture wars,’ in the 21st-century U.S. empire. How are colonialist and orientalist assumptions about SWANA sexualities bound up with racialized surveillance as a key mode of the U.S. imperialist project? How might we come to understand technologies of sexual policing and control as intrinsic to neo/colonial power, both within the SWANA diaspora and in international sites of occupation and resistance, as in Palestine? And how might we challenge an approach that sutures SWANA-American sexuality with wound, violence, and invasion by theorizing the potential for pleasure, play, and ambivalent intimacies?

Foregrounding critical SWANA feminisms, the panel broadly considers convergences of “physical” wars and “culture wars” along questions of gender, sexuality, religion, race, “extremism,” and “radicalization” in the broad war on terror. Working across interdisciplinary and transnational methodological approaches, the contributors to this session consider the centrality of policing sexuality to militarized and carceral regimes. We include analyses of material and discursive tensions concerning sexuality, gender, and secularism in approaches to the Muslim Right in contemporary U.S. Culture Wars; reflections on approaches to Middle Eastern women in/and pornography at the nexus of warfare, U.S. militarism, and the affective and intellectual residues of ‘War Porn’; the evocations, use, and manipulation of sexuality in imperial technologies of racialized surveillance; and technologies of sexual re/production in the form of sperm extraction and sperm smuggling in the carceral practices of the Israeli occupation and Palestinian prisoner resistance. In so doing, we not only attend to how an analytic situated in sexuality studies contributes to new directions in critical SWANA studies but also invite critical consideration of what a SWANA feminist analytic brings to the study of sexuality in/and late-stage U.S. empire writ large.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Thinking Materially about the Muslim Right - Najwa Mayer, University of California-Davis

• On “War Porn” and “Porn of War”: The War on Terror in Interracial Adult Film - Sena Duran, University of Michigan

• “A ‘form of porn’: weaponizing “safe spaces” in digital anti-SWANA and anti-Muslim racism - Amira Jarmakani, San Diego State University

• “To Create More Life”: Colonial and Anti-Colonial Practices of Sperm Circulation in Palestine - Samia Saliba, University of Southern California

Chair

• Rana M Jaleel, University of California-Davis

Biographical Information

Najwa Mayer: Najwa Mayer is an interdisciplinary scholar of race, gender, Islam, and US empire, working at the intersection of cultural politics, social movements, and critical theory. She is currently Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University and a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar in the Society of Fellows at Boston University. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University.

Sena Nurhan Duran: Sena Nurhan Duran is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Culture with certificates in Women’s and Gender Studies and Film, Television, and Media Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research and writing attend to the histories and production of Middle Eastern and Muslim racialized gendered and sexual subjectivities in the U.S., with particular attention to visual cultural history. Her dissertation draws from Arab and Muslim American feminisms and women of color feminist pornography studies to trace Middle Eastern women’s racialized sexual histories in the U.S. through the archive of the adult film industry as a case study.

Amira Jarmakani: Amira Jarmakani, she/they, is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and affiliated faculty with the Center for Islamic and Arabic Studies and LGBTQ+ studies at San Diego State University. Her most recent book, An Imperialist Love Story: Desert Romances and the War on Terror (NYU Press 2015), explores the crucial role of desire in understanding how the war on terror works and how it perseveres. She also authored Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S. (Palgrave Macmillan 2008), which won the National Women’s Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldúa book prize. She is co-editor, with Pauline Homsi Vinson and Louise Cainkar, of Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies (Syracuse University Press, 2022) and a Series Advisor for the Critical Arab American Studies Series with Syracuse University Press. She has served as president of the Arab American Studies Association (2018-2022), board member for the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies (2017-2019) and Assistant Editor for the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (2011-2013). She is an organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and a member of both the Palestinian Feminist Collective and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.

Samia Saliba: Samia Saliba is a PhD student in American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a member of USC’s Critical Southwest Asia/North Africa (SWANA) Studies Research Cluster. Her work focuses on constructions and policing of terrorism over time and explores the intersections of gender violence, economic violence, carcerality, and imperialism in SWANA and its diasporas. She is also a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers whose creative writing has been published in Mizna, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Apogee, and elsewhere.

**PANEL CHAIR, Rana M. Jaleel: Rana M. Jaleel is an Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She holds a PhD in American Studies from New York University, a JD from the Yale Law School, and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. From 2013 –2015, Dr. Jaleel was the Center for Reproductive Rights Fellow at Columbia Law School. At UC Davis, Dr. Jaleel is a 2022-2025 Chancellor’s Fellow and a 2021-2024 College of Arts & Sciences Dean's Faculty Fellow.

Her first book, The Work of Rape received a 2021 Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and was co-winner of the 2022 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Prize from the National Women's Studies Association. Her academic work has been published in places like South Atlantic Quarterly, Amerasia, The Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Cultural Studies, Social Text: Periscope, and The Brooklyn Law Review. Dr. Jaleel is part of the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal’s Editorial Collective. A longtime member of the American Association of University Professors, she presently chairs the Association's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.