Performativity of bodies and queer spaces in Egypt

Abstract

How do people from sexual and gender dissidence interact with urban spaces in Cairo? In this text I problematize the category of sexual minority as a static, homogeneous and oppressed group in one of the largest cities in the world. Instead, I did an ethnographic mapping from 2016 to 2019, where performativity of the body of people who express or live some or many of their sexual desires out of heteronormativity and heterosexuality reveal their positionality beyond a so called LGBT+ community: they break temporalities and spatialities that are binary and fixed, as if the heterosexual and homosexual worlds were separeted by a wall of majority vs. minority, and instead they create what Merabet calls queer habitus. This public ethnography of Cairo is indebted to people from the LGBT+ community and outside it, whom I had the pleasure to meet between 2016 and 2019. I will talk about geographies and bodily performativities in cafes, private parties, and nightclubs. Although all of these performativities and spaces are intersected by class, race, gender and migratory status, I would highlight each of these elements in each of these geographies to shed light on the contradictions of bodily performativities of people dissenting from heterosexuality, heteronormativity, or both.