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Tag: queerswana

Episode 198 [in English]: This Arab Is Queer

Elias Jahshan is a Palestinian/Lebanese-Australian journalist, writer and editor. He most recently edited the anthology This Arab Is Queer, which features eighteen queer Arab writers (including a good handful of former podcast guests) sharing stories across a variety of locations, experiences, and aesthetic styles. Elias joined us to talk about growing up in Western Sydney, breaking into the journalism field in Australia and England, and the assumptions he encountered while writing for both Arab and LGBTQ centered publications. He also discussed the process of putting this memoir together, the particular care involved in editing personal work, the quandaries involved in potentially translating the book in the future, the beauty of letting people write about whatever they f*cking want, and more. 

You can find This Arab is Queer at your local independent bookstore, possibly library, bookshop.org, or Amazon if you really must.

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Episode 195 [in English]: Intensity and Exhaustion

We’ve got a personal episode this week with Ellie, Alia, and Nadia! 

A lot of the discussion focuses on one particularly eventful day for Alia and Nadia that included:

  • Alia attending a protest in solidarity with Iranian women’s rights, along with some friends from Iran, who discussed how optimism and political energy varies across micro-generations. 
  • The puppet/public art project Walk With Amal, which was heartwarming, but also brought up complicated feelings about the need for art to create empathy towards refugees.
  • The documentary Sirens about the Lebanese all women thrash metal band Slave to Sirens, which was both beautiful in its authentic depictions of Arab women, and bittersweet in having the last three years of events in Lebanon as a backdrop. 

Also in this episode, we wonder about the origins of weird wedding rituals (and why isn’t there a Worst Man?) We also discuss the sense of tired fogginess a lot of us have been feeling lately, and the weird void that comes with unlearning internalized capitalism: if we stop basing our self worth on our productivity, what are we supposed to base it on…just being hot? Plus, we talk sapphic sci-fi storylines.

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