What does the interaction between Middle East Studies and queerness look like? What does it signify? And why, if at all, does heeding this connection matter for both Queer and Middle East studies? This special issue navigates these questions and poses many more to generate a productive engagement with the set of politics and theories that “Queering the Middle East” enables. For example, if we were to begin by contemplating the set of meanings that “Queering” generates, and then place them in interaction with the “Middle East,” we will have to start by accounting for numerous questions that pertain to spaces and times across which meaning-production takes place. The emergence of the term “queer” has an official story, a common narrative that grounds meanings encompassing a set of non-normative political identities, owing to the specificities of times, AIDS and the spatialities of reproducing and navigating Western capitalist modernity. The necessary task of locating the spatiotemporal origins instructing the will to name “the queer” as such and categorically to identify the subjects enfolded within its official story, is one of accounting for the web of power-knowledge, a la Foucault, through which a deconstructive, queering critique trumps “queer” as an identity signifier. Queering, a verb and a theoretical inquiry, therefore, speaks to the necessities of disciplinary “unsettlement rather than systematization.” In other words, queering articulates the will to challenge the very terms through which it has been enabled, working against its own canonization and solidification within an official narrative and systematised origins. Queering’s failure to systematize the world does not collapse it to an investment in “irrelevance” as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner state, but rather “it means resistance to being an apparatus for falsely translating systematic and random violence into normal states, administrative problems, or minor constituencies.” We could pause here to contemplate how queering of the Middle East becomes a necessary task through which a challenge to the field’s normative assumptions and systematising of violence, including through the hailing of the very term “Middle East,” takes place. Edward Said’s Orientalism posited this very resisting task onto the field’s Euro-centric and imperialist origins and paved the way for growing inquiries on how gender,

中文翻译：

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客座编辑介绍：中东研究的趣味性：绘制有用的交叉口

中东研究与酷儿之间的相互作用是什么样的？它代表什么？以及为什么还要注意这种联系对酷儿研究和中东研究都重要？本期专刊探讨了这些问题，并提出了许多其他建议，以使人们对“挑战中东”所能支持的一系列政治和理论产生富有成效的参与。例如，如果我们首先考虑“ Queering”产生的一组含义，然后将它们与“ Middle East”互动，则我们必须首先考虑与跨时空有关的众多问题。意义的产生发生了。“酷儿”一词的出现有一个官方故事，这是一个共同的叙述，其含义基于包含一系列非规范性政治身份的含义，由于时代的特殊性，艾滋病以及西方资本主义现代性的复制和传播空间。定位时空起源的必要任务是指示意愿将“同性恋者”这样命名，并进行分类以识别其官方故事中所包含的主题，这是解释权力知识网络的一种方式，即福柯，通过它破坏性，令人发指的批评胜过“酷儿”作为身份指称者。因此，晃晃，动词和理论探究都说明了纪律“不解决而不是系统化”的必要性。换句话说，酷儿表达了挑战其启用条件的意愿，反对官方叙述和系统化起源中的规范化和巩固。Queering无法将世界系统化的过程并不能像Lauren Berlant和Michael Warner所说的那样，将其崩溃成对“无关紧要”的投资，而是“这意味着抵抗成为虚假地将系统和随机暴力转化为正常状态，行政问题或较小的选区。” 我们可以在这里停下来思考如何将酷刑中东变成一项必不可少的任务，通过挑战这一领域的规范性假设和将暴力系统化，包括通过称呼“中东”一词来进行。爱德华·赛义德（Edward Said）的东方主义将这一极具挑战性的任务归结为该领域以欧洲为中心和帝国主义的渊源，并为人们对性别，