UNCOVERING QUEER ARCHIVES IS A RADICAL ACT OF RESISTANCE: FILMS OF RESISTANCE RESPONDS TO MAY ZIADE’S NEO NAHDA

Archiving is an addictive form of resistance. It’s also slow and laborious, a practice of patience. Digging must generally be an addiction, be it for music, for sounds, for memes or for information. More often than not, however, we’re told archiving is boring — in academic spaces in particular. Perhaps there’s a professor that slyly admits to liking archives with an embarrassed laughter. Perhaps there’s a student that complains about having to go to the archives because the paper they’re doing is all about primary sources. But it really doesn’t have to be like that.

I first discovered — and fell in love with — searching archives with a friend who was researching the history of British minority resistance to police oppression and racist attacks. She was studying the way that the Black and Brown communities came together in the past decades, and what broke that common resistance (something that the authorities had consciously been trying to achieve, because together we’re far too strong for them). It was with her that I discovered sources of the queer resistance coming together in solidarity with the miner’s movement in an intersectional strike for our rights. The working class with the queers. The sober daytime parties of the British Muslim and Hindi community in the 90s. The rave culture that embraced us all. A time when we were able to see all our struggles as united; a time when intersectional solidarity formed on its own.

Yet, we’re told now, as if this intersectionality is new. As if acceptance of diversity is an inherently Western, contemporary concept. And much of what reaches the mainstream from various resistance struggles supports that with its stream of pink- and greenwashing that frames the West as having the monopoly over intersectionality. However, this is just a narrative that, alike earlier Orientalist narratives, is created to serve those who rule the world hegemony. Thankfully, this is a narrative that May Ziadé’s Neo Nahda counteracts by uncovering the alternative in Arab history.

In Ziadé’s beautiful short, the flurry of the visuals make us feel the protagonist’s obsession with uncovering the unexpected: photographs of Arab women crossdressing as men. Why? We don’t know. Perhaps it’s something empowering — a feminist play that challenges a sexist, colonial discourse¹  — or something queer — a crossdressing that seeks non-straight identities. No wonder the protagonist of Neo Nahda gets obsessed: feminist and queer challenges from women in the Arab world? The world we’re told so often is so “behind” when it comes to feminist, queer politics? Wow.

Speaking with Sarah Agha, our guest for the panel talk on the film, she shares with me how, belonging to a diaspora community living in the West, it’s easy to sometimes fall into the trap of believing in the myths we are told over and over again. Speaking with her I’m reminded of the power of films such as Neo Nahda: they help us to remember. Help us rediscover. Help us see that probably, there’s so much more: so much crossdressing, so much queerness, so much resistance and intersectionality and solidarity and mutual aid. It’s present every time there’s a resistance struggle — and the resistance struggle is always there, sometimes latent and sometimes active. For every oppressed that refuses to be oppressed, that refuses their assigned place, that seeks freedom.

This phenomenon of constantly needing to remember and rediscover amidst sociohistorical erasure not unique. As historian Bec Wonders said in a talk on archival practices at Etceteras, the status quo makes us feel like we need to solve each problem as if it was for the first time. It’s first when we look to archives, we realise that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time². And it should come as no surprise that we’re constantly feeling as if we do as so much history is erased and displaced — even more blatantly now with many archival and historical buildings in Palestine having been destroyed by enemy missiles. Now is as important time as any to continue to uncover archival treasures and keep the knowledge of the existence of all that world hegemony is attempting to suppress. As anarchist practices tell us there’s a zine or an archival source for pretty much everything; as indigenous practices teach us, there’s so much ancestral knowledge if we know how to listen; and as Films of Resistance believes, sharing culture is one of our strongest resistances to genocide.

Even today, as we watch disaster unfold in Palestine and Lebanon with deaths, explosions, shootings, bombs indiscriminately fired on populations whose very existence is, by the hegemony, perceived as a threat to the global status quo. At the same time we hear of our comrades in the West arrested, raided and beaten for expressing their solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

We join forces in support as best we can. Sometimes, that means sending love to a friend. Sometimes, a long conversation. Sometimes, it’s sharing tears. Sometimes, it’s active resistance, or collecting resources to spread amongst bombed communities. And sometimes, it’s by not giving in to the narrative that we’re fed. And once in a while uncovering a gem of an alternative story in an archive and becoming obsessed with following its trail. Whatever we do, let’s not lose hope. Because we’ve done all of this before — we’re just taught that it never happened.

¹ As Yasmine Nachabe argues is the case of some 1920s photographs of crossdressed Lebanese women: “Two Women Dressed up in Men’s Suits challenges a gendered discourse by interrogating naturalized assumptions about gender and identity. In reading this photograph, I am not thinking of identity as an already accomplished historical fact, but as a production, an interstice: neither European nor Middle Eastern, neither masculine nor feminine. The subjects are somewhere in between. The colonized/women disguised themselves in the colonizer/man’s clothing in order to enjoy the dominant position of the colonizer/man for the brief moment of the photograph. In this view, identity is not a stable signified that a single signifier passively represents. The photograph can be seen as a complex dialogue between women as objects of patriarchy and women as agents of their own future. It suggests a different way to enact gender, a different way to be a female in the bourgeois context of early mandate Lebanon.” Source: Yasmine Nachabe, “An Alternative Representation of Femininity in 1920s Lebanon: Through the Mise-en-Abîme of a Masculine Space,” New Middle Eastern Studies, 1 (2011).

² Bec Wonders, historian, speaking at Etceteras: feminist festival of publishing and design at Casa Comum, Porto, Portugal, 5-7 October 2023.

GUEST CURATOR’S BIO

Films of Resistance is a decentralised community film screening and fundraising resource that believes in the power of cinema to expose, inspire, reflect, frame and reframe; its ability to incite change and resistance on a local and global level. With documentary and fiction films chosen for their artistic impact, the initiative aims to inspire deep thinking, understanding, compassion, and — ultimately — long-term, sustainable and active resistance to the genocide and oppression of the Palestinian people.