I am interested in thinking with this notion of \u2018making\u2019 rather than demonstrating; of approaching a project like Takweer as a mode of queer world-making, rather than as an attempt at unearthing or authenticating queerness vis-a-vis Arabness. The purpose of a project like Takweer is not so much to locate the queer within the Arab world and to delineate an \u2018authentic\u2019 mode of being Arab and queer, but to queer the Arab world itself and to challenge the Western origin story when it comes to queerness, destabilising our understanding of who is and what is queer, and who is and what is Arab. What might it mean to route a queer gaze through the Arab world? What might it mean to learn queerness as a mode of being and becoming, as an orientation in and towards the world, from and through rather than against and without, Arabness?<\/p>\n
In terms of the genres of content that appear on Takweer, they exist to serve three arguments: that \u201cqueerness\u201d has always existed in the Arab world; that the Arab world had a historically ambivalent relationship to gender and sexual non-normativity, which created room for manoeuvre when it came to gendered and sexualised expression; and that Arab culture itself is characterised by a camp sensibility at odds with its professed heteronormativity. The page began as a repository of cultural artefacts that had shaped Kaabour\u2019s own relationship to queerness at the intersection of Arabness, and which compelled him to begin a journey of historical exploration in search of queer ancestors, starting first with taken for granted but marginalised and uninterrogated popular historical knowledge he had been exposed to growing up in Lebanon, and moving on to a search for and engagement with scholarly material, as well as historical print and photographic media. As the page developed a following, Kaabour was guided in his searches by his audience.<\/p>\n
By way of an example, in a post titled \u201cThe Fascinating Life of Iraq\u2019s Trans Folk Singer\u201d, Kaabour presents Masoud El Amaratly, an Iraqi singer he tells us rose to fame in the 1920s and was known for his distinctive voice and the rural folk songs he sang. Like many of Takweer\u2019s posts, it is brief. We do not get a detailed a narrative about El Amaratly\u2019s gender journey or even his understanding of his gender identity, and what his becoming entailed or how it was received. Instead, we get snippets pieced together from a variety of unnamed sources that offer a glimpse into the existence of a \u2018trans\u2019 subject who not only existed in the region but seems to have perhaps thrived to some extend within its regional music scene. Such narratives are often presented without much accompanying commentary, leaving it to the audience to make of it what they will, to speculatively fill in the gaps and imagine how figures like El Amaratly moved through space and time.<\/p>\n
Kaabour acknowledged during our conversation that El Amaratly was received in what appears to be an ambivalent manner that enabled contradictory approaches to his gender identity. He emerges as a celebrated folk singer whose talent enabled his gender to be perhaps tolerated or ignored. Kaabour doesn\u2019t present this ambivalence to his audience on his Instagram page. Rather, he presents them simply with the fact of El Amaratly\u2019s existence, and of his positive reception as a folk singer. This, in many ways, is enough, as the existence of a regionally popular gender variant folk singer in the contemporary Middle East would feel, for many, impossible to imagine today. El Amaratly is a trace of something in the past that queer Arabs are told in the present cannot exist. Importantly, he\u2019s a trace of transness and queerness from the early twentieth century, when anti-colonial sentiment and struggle surged throughout the region, destabilising the distinction between pre-colonial gender and sexual non-normativity and the argument that the colonial encounter resulted in the erasure of alternative modes of embodying and practicing non-normative gender and sexuality.<\/p>\n
![\"Takweer](\"http:\/\/a-desk.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Takweer-Archive_Shanab.jpg\")
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In 1942, for example, the popular Egyptian magazine al-Ithnayn wa-l-Dunya<\/em> published an article titled \u201cIf I Had a Moustache,\u201d in which several actresses were asked what moustache they would choose for themselves were they men. In 1944, the also popular weekly Al-Musawar<\/em> featured a photo series of Egyptian actors and actresses cross-dressing and posing with one another. Images from both pieces appear on Takweer. From the series from Al-Musawar<\/em>, Kaabour shares a photo of famed Egyptian comedian Ismail Yassin in women\u2019s attire, being helped off a bus by dancer and actress Gamalat Hassan dressed in a suit and tarboush. According to Kaabour, the caption in the original series reads, \u201cin unparalleled grace, Ismail Yassin attempts to get off the bus, while Gamalat Hassan preceded him and took his hand to support him for fear of falling.\u201d<\/p>\n To the moustachioed actresses one commenter responds: \u201cArab women invented drag kings.\u201d To the photo from the Al-Musawar<\/em> series, one commenter responds by asserting that famed Egyptian writer Tawfiq al-Hakeem \u201cis queer\u201d. Kaabour told me that al-Hakeem had published a letter in a previous issue of Al-Musawar<\/em>, calling for actors to swap clothes, to which the magazine responded by organising the above mentioned series. With regards to the commenter on al-Hakeem’s sexuality, Kaabour asked them to elaborate, to which they responded by saying they \u201cdon\u2019t really have proof,\u201d but explained that in the published collection of his personal letters, Zahrat Al Omer<\/em>, the exchanges between him and his best friend Andre read like he \u201cwas very emotionally attached to Andre in a way that felt intimate and vulnerable.\u201d Kaabour responded to this by saying that when he read al-Hakeem’s call for gender swapping in the magazine, he \u201cwas almost certain such words wouldn\u2019t come out of a non-queer man.\u201d These posts paint a picture of an Arab world in which a practice like cross-dressing was not only tolerated but encouraged.<\/p>\n![\"Takweer](\"http:\/\/a-desk.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Takweer-Archive_CrossDressing.jpg\")
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