Leading thinker on female homosexuality in Muslim communities to give public talk
The latest trends in the study of homosexuality and migration will be explored in a free lecture taking place on 25 November between 5.30 and 7pm in Ken Edwards Lecture Theatre 3.
Homosexuality is still a controversial topic in many Muslim communities both in the West and elsewhere. The work of Samar Habib has been central to the late critical exploration of Islam’s relationship with homosexuality, a rich and complex history often shirked by conservative Islamic commentators and generally unknown to western onlookers keen to construct Islam as uniformly repressive.
In her lecture 'States of Being: Narratives of Queer Muslim Diasporas in Contemporary Scholarship’, Habib will take a geographic survey of this abundance in contemporary scholarship on queer Muslim diasporas in search of common threads and differences across national borders and contexts.
Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, this lecture will be the inaugural event of Queering Islam, a new series of events in the academic year 2015-2016, involving lectures, readings and film screenings probing the relationship between Islam and sexual non-normativity. The series’ organiser, Dr Alberto Fernández Carbajal is Leverhulme Fellow at the School of English. The events are meant to inform his 3-year research project Queer Diasporas: Islam, Homosexuality and a Micropolitics of Dissent.