A voice of its own!!!

With my work of problematizing arbitrary western; want and need, to sexually “liberate” the Arab, with what I call pink imperialism, the “One Day One Struggle” launched by the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies, is very important. This is a true struggle, a voice of its own.

In Lebanon the organizations Meem, Helem and Nasawiya created this video campaign where different people from different part of the society talks about these issues. Listen watch and get inspired.
The campaign wesite that is called jismi "my body"
www.jismi.net

Sun City Girls 330.003 Cross Dressers

Théatre de Beyrouth is hosting the two half Lebanese brothers Alan and Richard Bishop from the legendary experimental rock group Sun City Girls. The group was founded in 1981 in Arizona. With a style that is hard to categorize, somewhere in the land of experimental rock, that borders with jazz and spoken word; they became the ultimate underground rock group.
Yesterday was the legendary night with the brothers playing old Sun City Girls repertoires and tonight is the night for the brothers to play both their solo projects.
In the same time the label Annihaya is releasing their third album Sun City Girls Gum Arabic, an album of covers of the band’s repertoire.
You can read on their homepage: “Trust NO One! Investigate for yourself. Self-motivate yourself to KNOW (Not BELIEVE). Believing is for idiots. Knowing is everything. How does one KNOW? Figure it out YOURSELF! No one else can tell you or show you how."
I just found myself two mentors Amen / A of Arabia

Articles and Molokhia

I'm almost done with my articles about Chaza Cherafeddien's exhibition "Divine Comedy" that inspired me to write about the Amrad a while ago. I had a big portion of Molokhia today and i think that was the reason my productivity went sky high.

They say that the Druze community can't eat it because of its resemblance of sperm. Hmmmmm

Kind of tolerant and kind of like San Francisco means a real hell for others.

You can read in Jerusalem Post today that Lonely Planet has ranked Tel-Aviv as the 3:rd hottest city for 2011, and describing: “ Israel's most international city as hedonistic, tolerant, cultured, and a truly diverse 21st-century hub.”

And then comes the common way to explain for us how hot and sizzling it is, by comparing it to another international (read western) city, by calling it:” "a kind of San Francisco in the Middle East."
What I love with Pink Washing, is that in all its aggression to really make us understand how liberate and sexually free Tel-Aviv is, its still this wonderful insecurity weaved into all this.
If u writes “hedonistic” and put the word “tolerant” next to it.Does it mean that Tel-Aviv is tollerant to my hedoinism or that Tel-Aviv is tollerant in general? If a city already is hedonistic isn't the tollerance obvious? I think it's fishy already there. And after that the ever so wonderful, “a kind of San Francisco”.



All this shows to me that Tel-Aviv is kind of Hedonistic and kind of like San Francisco. So in between all this, “kind of “what is lurking? What is hiding in the “kind of”?
Maybe that a few miles away the country of this “tollerant, and truly diversed” city is un-tolerantly and treating part of its diversity like animals.
I think these pictures really show that it is no pride in occupation.



Pictures from "an Israeli NGO that collects testimonies and photos of troops who have served in the occupied territories" Read more on the blog Water in Majorca.

Pink Imperialism part 2. Pink Washing in Beirut?

I was at my favorite gay bar in Beirut last night. This bar is very frequented by tourists. The music was pumping, the Halloween decoration was hanging down from the ceiling. I sat with my friend who is the owner of the bar and drank my favorite late night drink, Arraq.
All of a sudden a big and noisy man with maybe a little bit too much to drink entered the bar. He was happy and loud and wanted Arraq like me. He kept on asking if me and my friend were a couple so we started to play along. He wanted us to kiss and touch each other in front of him, and asked if all of us could have a three some. I got amused by his way of consuming me and my friend as an object for his desire, so I started to talk about Beirut and sex. The man was a chancellor from The Australian Embassy of Cairo and was at a visit in Beirut to let off some steam.
He praised Lebanon for being so more Liberal then Egypt, when it came to sex and bragged about how he went down to the Corniche of Beirut and had sex with five Syrian workers. Here in Lebanon the term “Syrian worker” means a poor man from Syria with no legal papers that is doing all the shit job for the Lebanese people. In Cairo the poor people that he had sex with had to be bought in a much discreet manner.
-It’s somehow through these gay men on the embassies that we have start to have a little liberation to be able to open bar and clubs that is oriented towards the gay crowd. My friend said.
Now, when the rainbow flag is the new black for the neo-liberals, what does gay liberation means in a neo-liberal world with demands for open markets? Now when gay is THE measuring tool for the west, to stamp a country in the global south “western approved”, what is the demands?
Israel is getting the trend and is now promoting itself as “the only safe place for gay people in the Middle East”. With this approved stamp from the west, Israel is pink washing the not only the crimes and the occupation towards the Palestinian but hides the fact that Israel is a very religious, homophobic and patriarchal society. Benjamin Peim wrote an article in The Jerusalem Post, that the hunt for the pink dollars has positioned Beirut and Tel-Aviv in a battle of becoming THE hotspot for gays in the Middle East.
If this is accurate, what happens to the people actually living here when the white man once again is demanding an open market and to have access to this region? What happens when gay life becomes a gated society for a white man to indulge himself with sex from the hot, horny and desperate Arabs? Is liberation meant for the poor Syrian worker or the Palestinian refugee kid that is working extra to let white men, on holiday, blowing their cocks at the corniche?
I’m willing to get rid of all symbols, if a rainbow flag is going from being a symbol for protection to be a symbol for a state to hide it´s crimes done to its population.

Amrad and I part 2

I discussed beauty and masculinity/androgyny with a friend. The reason was that I have been to some friends in Dahi, and many of them have these portraits that almost look like homage to Hussein, Ali’s son the cousin of the prophet Muhammed. They are all brushed with colors to highlight eyebrows and lashes and the cheeks are made rosy. I kept on thinking of the Amrad, being an object of beauty, but here the beard don’t seem to be a problem to portray a man as an object.

I fell over these pictures of talibans, that have the same postproduction like the pictures that I’ve seen in Dahi. I think they look absolutely amazing. Don’t you?

Amrad and I, or “we all share fascination over the androgynous” part 1

I’m writing an article about Chaza Cherafeddines exhibition “Divine Comedy”, that was exposed September 23rd through October 13th at the Agial Art Gallery in Beirut. The project deals with our “understanding of beauty” and look at the changes in the Islamic art from the 16th and the 18th centuries to the early 20th century . What you can see is a change, in beauty, from a more androgynies state of mind to a more fixed binary system of gender.
Chaza Cherafeddine and I have both read the book “Women With Mustaches and Men Without Beard”, by Afsaneh Najmabadi, that deals with art from the Qajar Iran (1785-1925). So we both had a lot to talk about. One part of the book deals with the changes in the perception of gender by comparing portraits of “amorous couple”, from having almost identical features in the early days to become a more binary fixed perception of gender towards the 20th century. In the early portraits the young couple where both an object of beauty and desire for the male painter, to change to be an exclusive female feature in the later images. Towards the 20th century the woman’s breast became bare to exaggerate her sexuality and the man had a beard and became a man. It seems to Najmabadi that when the modernist project came along during the 19th under pressure of the western power, the more binary and fixed became the gender.
The beardless young man pictured in these paintings are called Amrad or Ghulam, they where the object of beauty, purity and innocence. West has sometimes described this “culture” to be of pedophilia but it was more a matter of admiration then of sexuality. What west seems to forget is its own obsession of androgynous youth in arts and literature from Leonardo Davinci to Thomas Mann .

But with west’s schooling project of the Middle East, the Amrad had to go. It feels like the modernism with its urge to clean up the world there was no time for in betweens: Efficiency please! So the man had to be more a man and the women had to be more a women. But through my research the Amrad or the Ghulam never really disappeared he has been hiding to have a comeback every now and then. It has been adopted by writers and movie directors both in the east and the west, and fiercely loved by the fashion industry in the end of the 20th century. My girlfriend that is fashionista complained in the nineties that “Why do all women have to look like boys on the catwalk, I’m getting to old for this!”
I fell over these pictures when I was browsing the internet. The painting is an old painting from the Qajar Dynasty and the photo is from the Jordanese born Canadian designer Rad Hourani’s latest collection. Well two different versions of an “amorous couple”.