The West-and specifically the United States-is at once imagined as a space of sexual freedom and as a place of political, economic, and ethnic marginalization.

The essay pays special attention to the ways in which sexual and economic liberation are entangled with complex Western presences within Lebanon. Full Book Name:Guapa Author Name:Saleem Haddad Book Genre:Contemporary, Fiction, Gay, LGBT, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novels, Queer, Queer Lit, Realistic Fiction ISBN 9781590517697 Edition Language:English Date of Publication: PDF / EPUB File Name:Guapa-SaleemHaddad. While Guapa is set in a hybrid Arab city, its depiction of a queer undercommons in a world shaped by US military and economic imperialism is insightful in understanding Lebanon’s social landscape and the transnational roots of its poverty. In particular, I demonstrate how Guapa attempts to formulate an existence beyond unfettered capitalism coarticulated with futurities beyond heterosexuality and patriarchy. I argue for the methodological advantages of reading for a queer undercommons rather than simply reading the novel in a genre of queer (Arab) fiction, as both existing scholarship and popular coverage have done. This article reads Saleem Haddad’s 2016 novel Guapa alongside the 2019 Lebanese revolution to elucidate how the concept of the undercommons, coined by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, can help remedy limited understandings of the role that economic precarity plays in conceptions of sexuality and citizenship in the Middle East.

Guapa book