This talk presents an ideology critique of Maysaloun Hamoud’s film In Between (2016), which follows three Arab women navigating intersecting racial, religious, cultural, and sexual oppressions. While critical of colonial racism, the film relies on civilizationist logics that ultimately undermine its feminist goals.

Through a formal reading of the film, this talk engages Middle East sexuality studies, queer liberalism, and homonationalism to demonstrate the political risks of abandoning ideology critique. Ultimately, it draws on historical materialism, queer of color critique, Indigenous critical theory, and transnational feminism to examine the political stakes of non-referentiality in queer theory.

Omar Alsayyed is a visiting assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Colgate University. His research and teaching interests include critical race and indigenous studies, transnational feminist and queer studies, Middle Eastern studies, and cultural theory. His current book project attends to contemporary aesthetic work that examines how Arab cultural and sexual politics navigate the colonial and racial logics of global capitalism

Lunch will be provided.