Dr Sabiha Allouche

While being primarily situated within feminist and queer studies, my work engages with and speaks to critical security studies, migration and refugee studies, and the literature on desire and social mobility. I am particularly interested in the racialized, sexed and gendered logics that affect how we move through the world. I am dedicated to producing decolonized knowledge – a belief that I hold dearly and strive to implement in my teaching and research.

My research showcases the workings of sect, race, class and migration on the construction of localized regimes of affective attachments in a post-conflict setting like Lebanon. It complicates prevalent approaches to the study of heterosexual relations at the intersection of familism in the contemporary Middle East. It combines affective analysis and with a political economy lens to complicate the binary between the normative and the anti-normative, the queer and the straight, to think queerly about how men and women in the Middle East navigate heterosexual love at the intersection of race, sect and class. It departs from traditional approaches to the Middle Eastern kin that analyse it through the lenses of either disciplinary power or political economy, to think about the complex affective attachments that inform traditional kin relations in the region. It pays particular attention to the racialisation of affect in a context like Lebanon, whose population is made up significantly of non-nationals. The book is based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon with dozens of self-identified cis and heterosexual couples.

I am happy to supervise research students working on:

• Gender and Sexuality in the Middle East
• Intersectional Transnational Feminism and Coalitional Politics
• Queer Aesthetics and Popular Culture
• Affect and Mediation in/and the Middle East