Rabih Alameddine and Haneen Maikey - Keynote from the Homonationalism and Pinkwashing Conference

Rabih Alameddine's and Haneen Maikey's keynotes from CLAGS' conference Homonationalism and Pinkwashing at The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York City, April 10-11, 2013.

For more information about the conference, see the conference website: http://www.homonationalism.org. For more information about CLAGS, see our website: http://www.clags.org.

Rabih Alameddine is a painter and novelist and author of Kool Aids: the Art of War (1998) a novel about an HIV positive gay man written against the backdrop of the Lebanese Civil War. Other fiction include The Perv (1999), I, The Divine (2001), The Hakawati (2008). A Guggenheim Fellow, his books are widely read in English, French and Arabic, especially in his naive Lebanon. Amy Tan called him "a writer of conscience, of self-consciousness, of subconsciouness, of the great big global unconscious. Within his stories are provocative ideas, housed in fractured narratives, splendid images, daring language—and simply great storytelling. What some might call disjointed narratives, I think of as the way our perceptions of time and space actually unfurl themselves: not linearly, but in a revelatory sense." Read more about Rabih Alameddine on his website: http://rabihalameddine.com/

Haneen Maikey is the founding director of alQaws: For Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society which may be the only Palestinian organization to exist on both sides of the wall of separation. Under her leadership alQaws has emerged as an international force for social justice, recently creating the centerpiece of the World Social Forum in Brazil- yet at the same time she works locally, sponsoring Queer PAlestinian Dance Parties at home that are attended by upwards of 400 people, participating in hot lines and grassroots community based activism. Haneen is also a co-founder of Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, an open member of the Palestine Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.