Academic Publications

"Coming Out for Community, Coming Out for the Cause: Queer Arab American Activism in the 1990s." Meridians 23:2 (2024), 465-489.
This article focuses on the life experience and political activism of Palestinian-American lesbian activist Huda Jadallah as an example of how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT/Queer) Arab Americans came out to both queer communities and Arab American communities in the 1980s and 1990s. I argue that this dual outness was utilized as a strategy through which to accomplish three interrelated aims: to build a queer Arab American community, utilize that community as a starting point from which to challenge anti-Arab sentiment within queer communities, and challenge homophobia in Arab American communities. Based on an oral history interview with Jadallah, in conjunction with analysis of Jadallah’s personal ephemera collection, this article also takes a queer archiving methodological approach to consider how outness as strategy may also be utilized with regard to queer Arab American archiving and history.

"Compulsory Zionism and Palestinian Existence: A Genealogy." Journal of Palestine Studies (2022): 1-6.
This essay offers a genealogy of the phrase “compulsory Zionism” in order to illuminate its vexed and contradictory intellectual foundations, the ethical and political stakes of the discourse surrounding the phrase, and its accompanying racial project. Scholars of late have taken up the use of this phrase to signal how “common-sense” knowledge about Palestine and Israel is naturalized in ways that privilege Israel and subjugate Palestinian existence. However, I argue that the phrase is also useful for understanding how Palestine solidarity politics are micromanaged within transnational leftist social justice movements and academia.

"Cinematic Activism: Grassroots Film Festivals and Social Movements in Pandemic Times." Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 62.2 (2021): 298-316.
This article addresses the pivot to virtual exhibition & festival-informed programming to sustain momentum in social justice organizing and activism during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. A virtual, cinema-based mode of activism informed by grassroots film festival practices emerged as a strategic method for keeping communities engaged. Virtual cinematic activism has broadened outreach in response to the overlapping political crises of COVID-19, anti-Black police brutality, and other forms of neoliberal and biopolitical state violence in the United States and in places such as occupied Palestine. I call this formation "cinematic activism" to highlight the virtual mediation of global grassroots social movements. I use this term polemically to describe the strategies and methods that leftist activists and artists have employed to maintain political energy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Forging Her Own Path.” Arab American Women: Representation and Refusal. Edited by Suad Joseph, Louise Cainkar, and Michael Suleiman. Syracuse University Press, 2021.
An interview with scholar-activist Elaine Hagopian.

"An Uprising at The Perfect Moment: Palestine in the 1990s Culture Wars." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 26.2 (2020): 243-272.
This article examines two overlapping controversies at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts, in the early 1990s over the attempted censorship of both Robert Mapplethorpe’s show The Perfect Moment and Elia Sulieman’s Palestinian film and video art exhibition Uprising. By analyzing the print news discourse on these controversies, namely, regarding the representations of children in The Perfect Moment and in two of the Uprising films (Children of Fire by Mai Masri and Intifada: Introduction to the End of an Argument by Suleiman and Jayce Salloum), the author articulates how Palestinian cultural politics were constructed as “politically queer” during the 1990s culture wars, which thereby contributed to the rise of homonormativity, increased visibility of leftist LGBTQ-Palestinian solidarity politics, and the development of Israeli pinkwashing as a political strategy. Through this analysis, the article advances a theory of “compulsory Zionism” as a concept through which to analyze the confluence of racial, ethnic, and sexual politics that haunt and animate Palestine solidarity politics in the United States.

“Arab American Queer Activism.” Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973–2001. Edited by Dan Berger and Emily K. Hobson, eds. University of Georgia Press, 2020.
A short, “snapshot” essay historicizing Arab American LGBT/Queer activism in the United States from the 1990s-2010s.

“New Wave Arab American Studies: Ethnic Studies and the Critical Turn.” American Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 1, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, pp. 231–43.
A long form review essay of post-9/11 scholarship in Arab American Studies.

Public Facing Scholarship

“‘Farha’ and the Claustrophobic State of Palestinian Cinema.” Palestine Square, Institute for Palestine Studies, January 12, 2023.
Unpopular opinion: Farha is not a very good film, but it is spectacular nonetheless. Farha is narratively and visually claustrophobic. This claustrophobia tells us a great deal about both the restrictions placed on representations of Palestinian history and the state of Palestinian cinema.

“Cultural Survival Amidst a Ravaged Geography.” Electronic Intifada.
A documentary photo essay. Palestine, 2008.