Kohl

Sex, Desire, and Intimacy has a set of articles on sexual non-conformity, histories of desire and disgust, queer intimacies, trauma and healing, kink, fantasies, and mental health.  

Beyond Victims and Savages: The Complexities of Violence, Resistance, and Pleasure” could not be more timely. Working on the issue for the past six months and delving into accounts, narratives, and politics of resistance that refuse the equation of victim/savage was by itself a collective act of resistance. This collection speaks against the oppressive violence we are experiencing in groups of marginalized and tokenized communities, whether at the hands of sensationalized, violent oppression or those of liberal and right-wing representations and monolithic discourses. Ultimately, writing back, thinking back, and organizing back intersectionally as brown leftist feminists provide a powerful alternative to the mainstreaming of gender and the normalization of suffering.

This issue opens with a description and a short excerpt of Dictaphone Group’s video performance Nothing to Declare. Dictaphone Group showed the video installation of their project at Kohl’s launch event on December 8, 2016. Nothing to Declare is a poignant project that follows the journey of three women, Tania El Khoury, Abir Saksouk, and Petra Serhal, along Lebanon’s old railway tracks, narrating their history and reflecting on borders as spaces of crossing, performance, and entrapment.

Speaking of a feminist knowledge production in the Middle East, South West Asia, and North Africa region is a daunting task. It has become increasingly difficult to centralize our knowledge production(s) in terms of location and definitions. Burdened with problems of access to information and lacking the tools to participate in the epistemological processes, our feminist movements struggle with the structures of domination and hegemony of knowledge in the MENA.  

How does the erotic apply in our contexts? We seem to always be construed as standing on either side of dichotomies: self/other, West/East, good/bad Arab, etc. The erotic refuses to be given that choice. It is sexual, of course, but it especially holds the power to imagine, to resist, to write history, and to produce erotic knowledge from a source of brown feminist dissent. The erotic does not belong to a specific feminist “wave,” as it does not subscribe to universalized scales and linear accounts of history. However, it retains the property of waves – untamable and in constant motion.