The Queer Arabs Alia, Ellie, Ahmed, Nadia and Adam

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 nods to some older work by Kobra, as well as the many factors that make the Kobra comic so unique. We also talk about what led Bijhan and her partner to…

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 talk about how (queer) bar culture and etiquette have shifted due to dating apps, Buc-ees, squirrels, and the new Zelda game.

( 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 thesis project ​​”Hayati (حياتي) – My Life / My Love,” an archive of queer, Middle Eastern and North African women and gender non-conforming-individuals across the US photographed alongside their personal safe spaces.  Noor discusses what drew…

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 band, and how the documentary process started with a Facebook message from Rita Baghdadi. She also describes what it was like to have such pivotal moments in her and her bandmates’ lives thoroughly…

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 and some of their theater projects, including a play exploring the effects of the Beirut explosion on two sisters, a historical fiction piece about a queer Egyptian in the 1950s (researched by interviewing their grandmother and great-grandmother), and an interactive…

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 pop-up events. They also talked about the mental health tolls of being in a quasi-community-organizer role, the unrealistic expectations placed on individuals with a moderately-sized public platform, and how they’ve learned to set boundaries around their time, energy, and social media…