This book explores the representation of queer migrant Muslims in international literature and film from the 1980s to the present day. Bringing together a variety of contemporary writers and filmmakers of Muslim heritage engaged in vindicating same-sex desire, the book approaches queer Muslims in the diaspora as figures forced to negotiate their identities according to the expectations of the West and of their migrant Muslim communities. The book examines 3 main themes: the depiction of queer desire across racial and national borders, the negotiation of Islamic femininities and masculinities, and the positioning of the queer Muslim self in time and place. This study will be of interest to scholars, as well as to advanced general readers and postgraduate students, interested in Muslims, queerness, diaspora and postcolonialism. It brings nuance and complexity to an often simplified and controversial topic.

Reviews

'With astounding skill, Carbajal manages to carve a unique space for Muslim queerness within the diaspora-a space that he defines as quotidian, yet nonnormative, and makes intelligible that which is inconceivable within the strictures of empire... Alberto Carbajal's monograph beautifully destabilizes assumptions of queer diasporic Muslim identity and seeks to not only illustrate the ways queer Muslims micropolitically redefine the hegemonic norms of heteronormative patriarchy, but also considers the multitude of ways they disorganize boundaries and categories within the everyday modes of action and affect.'
Journal of Religion & Film

Part I: Queering Islam
1. Muslim Homosexualities, Diaspora, Disorientation
Part II: Queer Interethnic Desire
2. Queer Micropolitical Disorientation and Phenomenology in Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette
3. Interstitial Queerness and the East African Ismaili Diaspora in the Films of Ian Iqbal Rashid
4. Diasporas in Reverse: Queering Orientalism in Ferzan Özpetek's Hamam: The Turkish Bath
Part III: Negotiating Islamic Gender
5. Countermemories of Desire: Female Homosexuality and 'Coming Out' in Shamim Sarif's I Can't Think Straight
6. Queering Ethnicity and British Muslim Masculinities in Sally El Hosaini's My Brother the Devil
7. At the Interstices between Secularism and Religiosity? Rolla Selbak's Three Veils
Part IV: Narrating the Self in History
8. Postcolonial Queer Melancholia, Sufism, and L'errance in the Autofictional Works of Abdellah Taïa
9. The Druzification of History in Diasporic Fiction by Rabih Alameddine
10. Queering Home and Sexuality in Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home
Conclusion