The Queer Arabs

Nahid is a Sudanese artist and activist with a background in theater, music, education, and human rights work.  Nahid talks about her current experience caretaking for her grandmother and how skills from working with children transfer to elder care.  She also discusses her childhood experience of displacement, moving from Sudan to Yemen and then Western Massachusetts following her father’s persecu...

Clarissa Bitar is an accomplished Palestinian oud musician and composer hailing from Los Angeles, California. With a background in Music and a specialization in Ethnomusicology from UC Santa Barbara, Clarissa’s musical journey has been enriched by training under esteemed Arab oudists such as Simon Shaheen, Charbel Rouhana, and Bassam Saba. Their performances have graced stages across the Uni...

Bijhan Agha is a trans Persian-American comic artist living in Uruguay, and second-time podcast guest! This time, she joined us to talk about her latest superhero comic “The Legendary X-Knights” for which the Kickstarter comes out today! “The Legendary X-Knights” is about a group of diverse people working together to defeat monsters. They are all brought together by message...

Sheyam Ghieth is an artist, organizer, Egyptian propagandist, and repeat podcast guest after 4 years!  Sheyam is a co-founder of Creators for Gaza, a SWANA-led mutual-aid network connecting artists and amplifiers with Palestinian families facing genocide. Check it out to donate or get involved as an artist! They also discuss their work drawing connections between disease and colonialism in genocid...

We’re back with an episode with Alia, Ellie, and Nadia talking about: – An incredible show Nadia saw called LINES about the interconnected histories of Palestine, Uganda, and the UK through prison systems  – Participating in Palestine protests and college encampments around us (and how college students are doing a better job of building a movement as they go than most of us) – Wh...

Hannah Moushabeck is a second-generation Palestinian American author, editor, and book marketer. She is the author of Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine, a children’s book about three girls who experience Palestine through bedtime stories. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts on the homelands of the Pocumtuc and Nipmuc Nations. Hannah talks about growing up in  New York, Massachusetts, and the...

Yaffa is a trans displaced Palestinian activist, engineer, death and birthing doula, peer support specialist, and artist. They are the Executive Director of Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity and recently released their book of poetry Blood Orange, raising funds for queer and trans Palestinian work.  In this episode, Yaffa reads a poem from Blood Orange, and we reflect on the cognitiv...

Lamya H., author of Hijab Butch Blues, joined us for a wonderful episode! Lamya talks about the line between invisibility and hypervisibility as a brown person in hijab in the US, alternatively overlooked or policed. She discusses her path into Queer Muslim community as well as her mixed experiences in both Arab and Desi spaces as someone born in a South Asian country who grew up in the Gulf. We a...

Finlay Sarafa McHale is a queer Iraqi/Chaldean-American clinical social worker currently facilitating a free peer support group for queer SWANA people. They joined us for a wonderful conversation about how mental healthcare can be a tool for political liberation rather than means of detaching from it.  Finlay discusses censorship and Zionism in the mental health field, the challenges of developing...

Leila Mire is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, as well as a dancer, choreographer, organizer, and sometimes disorganized person. She researches Palestinian dance and the role of dance in US and Israeli cultural imperialism. We discuss the misleading implications of certain “coexistence art” which locates interpersonal prejudice as the source of conflict while deliberately glo...

We got to have Amina Shareef Ali back for another episode!  She was on the podcast all the way back in January 2021 (episode 147), and we now had a wonderful conversation about her upcoming album, In the Dark (Awake of Course), volume 2. In this episode, Amina describes the throughlines of the tracks, who was involved in the making of the album (shout out to Radical Folksonomy!), and the parts of...

We were joined by the wonderful Bijhan Agha, a Persian-American author and creator living in Uruguay. Bijhan talked about her wonderful creation, Kobra Olympus.  Kobra is a trans, lesbian hijabi superhero with adventures that can be accessed and followed by you all if you get the comic when it comes out!  In this episode, Bijhan and Ellie dive in to some comic book history and discuss some of the...

We start off this episode by asking an AI to write a script for our podcast and doing a reading (did the AI get it right?) Then we talk about our actual lives. We discuss the legal attacks on trans rights in several Southern US states, plus some random transphobes at Waffle House. We commiserate about the challenges and doubts we’ve been encountering surrounding our respective careers. We also tal...

( See a walkthrough of Noor’s exhibit here! Hayati – My Life/My Love ) Noor Aldayeh is a visual artist from Los Angeles, California. She is an Honors Film and Media student at Emory University minoring in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies, and acts as a student photographer for the Office of Belonging Community and Justice at the university. Our conversation centered around Noor’s...

Alma Doumani is the bassist for Slave to Sirens, an all-women thrash metal band from Lebanon that gained international attention through the documentary Sirens, which depicts the lives of the band members over three years. Outside of music, Alma is also a photographer and video producer.  In the episode, Alma talks us through her love for the complexity of metal music, how she got connected to the...

Rayan Afif is a multi-media artist and theater maker of Egyptian and Lebanese descent making work that envisions queer SWANA futures. Rayan discussed some of their visual art which depicts dream physical spaces—including a mana’eesh cafe and queer SWANA drag race—and the importance of online community spaces when physical ones are not available. They also described their journey into playwriting a...

In this episode, we caught up with Rana Fayez, an Arab, non-binary, arts producer, musician/sound artist, DJ, archivist, and founder of YallaPunk. Rana told us how they started YallaPunk in 2016 in response to political attacks on the SWANA community and how the organization has evolved since then, including the festivals, language practice groups, pandemic-era community kitchen, residencies, and...

It’s our 200th episode! Alia, Ellie, and Nadia celebrate with a deep and messy group chat. We recall the early days of the podcast and some tough lessons about trust learned along the way. Then we discuss the World Cup, the brief resurgence of pan-Arabism surrounding the Moroccan team, and what we think of discourse on migrant workers’ rights, LGBTQ rights, and alcohol in Qatar. We talk about how...

Sarah Bitar is an actor, writer, and teaching artist from Lebanon. Since graduating from the Stella Adler School of Acting, she has been living and creating in NYC. Sarah joined us to talk about her experiences in both the Lebanese and New York theater scenes, and the relative challenges of finding space, funding, community, and consistency in each.  Sarah mentions her recent/upcoming projects inc...

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 journ...

This week we were joined by Iranian-Canadian lawyer, researcher, and writer Aytak Dibavar for an episode focused on the recent uprisings in Iran following Jina (Mahsa) Amini’s murder by “morality” police. Aytak discussed aspects of the movement that have been neglected in mainstream media and discussion, including Jina’s Kurdish identity, its working class roots, and the inclusion of queer voices....

On August 30, 2021, we published a magical bicoastal, virtually-recorded episode with Amir Aram Ronaldo.  We now have an in-person episode with them a little over a year later!  On October 30, 2022, we (Alia, Nadia, and Aram) set out on an adventure in NYC on a Halloween bookstore crawl.  Boba tea was had.  Pickles were purchased at a bookstore that has books and pickles.  Cats being walked in cle...

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, w...

Ahmed Sadkhan (The Healing Khan) is a queer activist and life coach specializing in inner alignment and inner child work.  He is Lebanese-Iraqi and grew up in Berlin; during this episode, Ahmed discusses the work he has done internally and externally to examine the pieces of himself and his identities that have yet to receive needed care.  Ahmed also talks about the work he has done with others to...

Hamzeh Daoud is a trans femme Palestinian researcher, organizer, and tech person originally from Amman, and currently based in Texas. She’s co-lead of the ongoing survey Presencing Ourselves: A Survey of LGBTQI+ Muslims in the U.S. (along with our recent guest Amara, and in partnership with Queer Crescent). **If this applies to you, you can take the survey here!!** This episode consists of complet...