Queer Jews, Queer Muslims: Race, Religion, and Representation

Groundbreaking essays on the intersection of Jewish, Muslim, and LGBTQ identities.

Through a curated selection of scholarship, Adi Saleem demonstrates that representations of Muslim and Jewish sexuality are often racialized and gendered in parallel ways as non-Western, deviant, and dangerous within Euro-American modernity. Contributors reckon with the intertwined past and present of Islamophobia, antisemitism, racism, coloniality, misogyny, and homophobia through distinct and complementary perspectives. In the first of three sections, scholars investigate the construction and performance of multiple identities and the crossing of boundaries. Studies of scriptural texts and media discourse as they shape perceptions of Jewish and Muslim gender and sexual minorities follow, highlighting how these representations impact the lived experiences of queer Jews and Muslims. The final section examines the efforts of contemporary queer Jews and Muslims to organize and form communities to forge solidarity in the face of multiple forms of oppression and marginalization. In conversation with Islamic studies, Jewish studies, and queer theory, this collection explores the interrelated experiences and representations of Jewish and Muslim minorities in Europe while triangulating the Jewish-Muslim dyad with a third variable: queerness.

Adi Saleem is an assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan. He is a cofounder and coordinator of the Jewish-Muslim Research Network (JMRN), an international research network of over two hundred scholars of Jewish and Muslim studies. His research focuses on the intersection of race and religion, or religion as race, particularly in relation to Jews and Muslims. He is currently working on a project examining the genealogies of French and European antisemitism and Islamophobia in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. His recent work has appeared in Contemporary French Civilization, French Cultural Studies, Modern & Contemporary France, and the Journal of Language and Sexuality. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.