OCAD University Assistant Professor Dr. Andrew Gayed’s research is located at the cutting- edge of interdisciplinary and transnational inquiry in art history, gender studies and critical race theory. Dr. Gayed’s scholarship has appeared in books, including the Routledge Handbook of Middle Eastern Diasporas, Unsettling Canadian Art History, and Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa, in addition to peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal for Studies in Art Education.
An Egyptian Canadian art historian, Dr. Gayed has an academic background in diasporic art, queer visual culture, and Middle Eastern art histories. Before joining OCAD U, where he teaches courses on global contemporary art, he was the Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality where he researched the artistic practices of the queer diaspora.
Dr. Gayed’s first monograph, Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art, published by the University of Washington Press (2024), shares innovative new research in visual art and culture that transforms our knowledge about queer experiences. Contributing to decolonizing the study of sexuality, this book illuminates the unexpected history of homosexuality in the Middle East as a way of better understanding the issues today that queer diasporic people of colour face.
He holds a PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from York University where he was awarded the Provost Dissertation Award, and holds an MA in Art History, and a BFA in Visual Arts. At OCAD U, Dr. Gayed has been awarded the Early Career Award for Excellence in Research as well as the Award for Teaching Excellence.
OCAD U caught up with Dr. Gayed to discuss his research.
What is the focus of your research and what inspired you to explore this topic?
My research is focused intensively on critical questions at the intersections of studies of visual culture, diaspora, citizenship/nationalism and queerness. Through the exploration of key debates and linkages between postcolonial theory, Middle Eastern diasporic politics and queer theory, my work is crucial to expanding the geopolitical and theoretical scope within the North American academy.
I am located at the forefront of interdisciplinary and transnational inquiry in the disciplines of art history, gender studies and critical race theory. At such a pivotal time, when Islamophobia and racism are at the forefront of societal concerns, the global approach of my research focuses on current and lived conditions of queer diasporic subjects and contributes to the growing literature on human rights in the Middle East and its relation to gender discourses and non-Western sexualities.
My scholarship investigates Middle Eastern diasporic artists in North America and Europe in the 21st century who are creating political art surrounding queer identity, whose work brings into play decolonial aesthetics. Diasporic art provides a rich platform to investigate the relationship of both colonial trauma and displacement within the queer community in North America and Europe, and how conceptions of home and homeland complicate transnational sexual identity.
Studying the cultural production of the queer diaspora is fruitful in investigating the ways to reach beyond the clichés of a sexually oppressed Middle East versus a sexually liberated West. Instead, I examine how diasporic sexuality is negotiated transnationally, moving beyond liberal coming-out narratives that focus solely on individual identification for self-actualization.
This points to an untenable whirlpool of prohibitions, inhibitions and conflicts that puts members of the queer diaspora in a difficult circumstance. The navigation of this circumstance and tension is the subject of my work. The issue results in a dichotomous double bind: queerness is a marker of non-belonging within the Middle East; yet in the West, these same people experience non-belonging because of their race.
This double bind that the queer diasporic subject often faces can be linked to colonial tensions, and the study of visual art and culture better illustrates the specific ways in which these sexual scripts are both manifested and negotiated by non-Western subjects in the West.
By incorporating different representational strategies in the analysis of contemporary art, my research strives to make self-identification less dichotomous and more expansive. Examining the aesthetic practices of the queer diaspora, I use visual analysis within a gender studies and postcolonial lens to explore multiple Modernisms and their relationship to displacement, trauma, and Arab sexualities/genders within an anti-imperialist framework.
In studying the existing literature on Middle Eastern diasporic communities, I bring queer identity into theoretical discussion with diaspora, creating a new framework for analysis, and I place emphasis on the multi-scalar sites where homophobia, racialization and discrimination take place. I explore these themes through the lens of visual art, focusing on the impact that diasporic experiences have had on someone’s visual art and cultural production.
Middle Eastern queer subjects trouble the promises of belonging, multiculturalism and acceptance on both sides of any border, and the current political climate around migrants and refugees in North America and Europe means that there is a possible continuity of queer experiences across these borders given the shared diasporic communities from which these artists operate. Analyzing the ways in which queer diasporic artists might experience racism and homophobia in different contexts is necessary to extend thinking about homonationalism into aesthetics and to create a transnational dialogue about diasporic art production.
My first monograph, Queer World Making: Middle Eastern Diasporic Contemporary Art, seeks to increase our understanding of queer diasporic experiences by expanding our knowledge of visual art production and the lens through which we analyze the experiences of queer subjects of colour. The publication is the first to formalize the field of Middle Eastern queer diasporic art and is one of the first monographs on Arab queer diasporic artists in Canada, and anywhere in the world.
The book shares innovative new research in visual art and culture that transforms our understanding queerness and multiculturalism. With an emphasis on decolonial politics, this book illuminates the unexpected history of homosexuality in the Middle East as a way of better understanding the issues today that queer diasporic people of colour face.
Examining the aesthetic practices of the queer diaspora, I use visual analysis to study contemporary art within a gender studies and postcolonial lens to develop a more nuanced canon of Middle Eastern art. My book aims to comprehensively bring forward new theories and methodologies for the interconnected study of art history, critical race theory, and queer theory. This book makes a necessary intervention within a broad range of disciplines including art history, gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, ethnic studies, and postcolonial theory.
The publication is an attempt to interrupt and re-position the queer Middle Eastern and Muslim diaspora as a source of radical agency that responds critically to the whiteness of queer studies. This research will continue to have great impact on research institutions in the new knowledge that will be created, impact within the vulnerable community of queer racialized citizens experiencing homophobia and/or racism, as well as impact on the individual level in providing tools and strategies to help contextualize the various traumas these communities are subjected to.
What drew you into this field of study in the first place? Was there a turning point or defining moment?
I draw on my lived experience in research and teaching as a method to open, foster and make accessible issues of visual representation in a globalized world. Coming to terms with my own subject position, a queer diasporic person of colour, was a conflicting task, caught between a stringent cultural practice and being socialized in a largely Eurocentric environment. Because of this, I centre non-European art histories from the Global South, with particular expertise in the Middle East, North Africa, West Asia, and their diasporas.
My research in the visual studies of race and ethnicity promotes interdisciplinary research in human rights that centers prominent issues like gender, sexuality, cultural difference, censorship, globalization, racialized media culture and coloniality to reflect on perspectives from the global South.
At a pivotal time when Islamophobia and racism are at the forefront of societal concerns, the postcolonial human rights approach of this research project focuses on current and lived conditions of queer diasporic subjects and contributes to the growing literature on human rights in the Middle East and its relation to gender discourses and non-Western sexualities.
Specific concepts to be examined within this theoretical approach include transnational sexual identity, queerness, colonial trauma and displacement, and transcultural differences within Canada. Such a postcolonial framework illuminates the necessary cause-and-effect relationship that historic sexuality discourses have had on contemporary understandings of sexuality, and how this history affects those currently living in the diaspora.
Building on the art historical trajectory of previous projects, my research explores diasporic homosexuality and, with global art histories and transnational queer theory being pillars of my theoretical framework, a postcolonial approach that is instrumental in locating contemporary notions of sexual discourse in the Middle East.
A major research objective of this project is to explore the ways in which a diasporic articulation of culture is integral to understanding how Middle Eastern sexuality narratives can function globally and are internalized/re-conceptualized by diasporic sexualities within Canada. These dichotomies create violence, trauma, and severe non-belonging that continue to have lasting effects on the queer diaspora.
What problem or question is your research trying to solve or answer, and why is this important?
Gender identification is one of the major conflicts diasporic communities have in transnational settings (Naber, 2012; Abdulhadi, 2012). Sexuality is not a constant in either host or home nation, leading to frictions that result in potential violence and vulnerability when community identification seems to conflict with gender and sexual norms.
The important link between cultural differences and sexual discourses is reiterated by sociologist Nadine Naber (2012), who argues that the diaspora can intensify its culture in North America, becoming even more culturally and religiously strict than the homeland.
The result is a very complicated space for diasporic sexuality, because, while the judicial system may support queer subjects in Canada, the Middle Eastern cultural community and family unit can be the site of abuse, trauma, disownment, and danger. These vulnerabilities that queer Middle Eastern subjects in Canada experience demonstrate that there is an incompatibility between how diasporic subjects are socialized to become queer subjects in the West and the conflicting, often contradictory, values and understandings of their own sexual desires from a cultural perspective.
Diasporic Middle Eastern artists who self-identify as queer provide a rich platform to investigate a transnational sexual identity and how it relates with colonial trauma and displacement within these communities. This project approaches this complex issue by answering the following research questions:
Hence, the objectives of this project are:
My research nuances and contributes to the growing scholarship on postcolonial queer theory, Middle Eastern contemporary art and diaspora studies. The main goal of this project is an interdisciplinary, transnational research inquiry into queer diasporic contemporary art, and to discuss racialized queer identity in Canada as a way of engaging with LGBTQ+ human rights transnationally in a social activist project.
By achieving these objectives and addressing these research questions, this project’s interdisciplinary, transnational inquiry of queer diasporic art and racialized queer identity in Canada will offer new data and analysis to the academic and non-academic communities for social activism and further engagement with the study of transnational LGBTQ+ human rights.
How do you see the research findings contributing to your field or affecting people’s lives in the real world?
By assessing the degree to which homophobia affects vulnerable racialized communities within Canada, and how the Arab and Muslim diasporic communities within Canada either accommodate or ostracize queer individuals within the community, this research will be an important contribution to knowledge.
This scholarship better informs how we can advantageously operationalize multicultural discourse within Canada to account for queer racialized minorities, develop quality research that enables social scientists, mental health professionals and everyday citizens experiencing homophobia and racism firsthand to better understand coping strategies on their own terms.
The project is highly original because it is unique in providing diasporic perspectives linking queer experiences in home countries in the Middle East to the host countries in Canada, the United States and within Europe.
This research will provide researchers, NGOs, social practitioners, and community members in-depth analyses of how they can more appropriately support these vulnerable communities within Canada who are caught between a complex web of race and sexuality. This research contributes significantly to a multi-scalar and multi-sited understanding of the complexity of multicultural experiences of sexuality and queerness in Canada amid globalizing forces.
Can you reflect on the significance and impact of your research?
My research moves beyond liberal coming-out narratives that focus solely on individual identification for self-actualization. This untenable whirlpool of prohibitions, inhibitions, and conflicts puts members of the queer diaspora in a difficult circumstance. The navigation of this circumstance and tension is the subject of my work.
The issue results in a dichotomous double bind: queerness is a marker of non-belonging within the Middle East, yet in the West, these same people experience non-belonging because of their race. This double bind that the queer diasporic subject often faces can be linked to colonial tensions, and the study of visual art and culture better illustrates the specific ways in which these sexual scripts are both manifested and negotiated by non-Western subjects in the West. This project is an urgent response to the violent orientalizing global formations that currently frame the queer Middle Eastern subjects in the global north.
The potential target audiences for this project are queer racialized Canadian citizens, queer immigrants and refugees settled in Canada, activist and community organizations supporting Muslim, queer, and/or racialized communities in Canada, as well as art historians, specialists of LGBTQ+ studies, and social scientists.
This research will continue to have great impact on research institutions in the new knowledge that will be created, impact within the vulnerable community of queer racialized citizens experiencing homophobia and/or racism, as well as impact on the individual level in providing tools and strategies to help contextualize the various traumas these communities are subjected to.
The published results from my overall research project have made a significant impact on instructors, researchers, and senior-level students in the disciplines of art history, gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, ethnic studies, and postcolonial theory. These publications have appealed to cultural workers, social workers and artists in North America and beyond.
What do you hope people—both inside and outside of your field—take away from your research?
Focusing on a queer Middle Eastern, South Asian and North African diasporic population in Canada allows for critical race theory to be in productive dialogue with queer theory, making the study of LGBTQ+ human rights less Eurocentric and more inclusive of immigrant and racialized experiences.
My research cultivates a dialogue within the Middle Eastern diaspora in Canada, indicating future possibilities for young queer artists, and the general public, to express their existing sexualities.
Providing nuance to the growing scholarship on Middle Eastern contemporary art and cultural studies, this research project poses the question of whether social scientists, cultural theorists, and historians can articulate a Western and non-Western queer history that works beyond sexual oppression (in the Middle East) versus sexual acceptance (in North America), and instead focus on the ways diasporic subjects create alternative coming-out narratives and identities to inscribe normative models of queerness that are not inclusive of racialized and immigrant experiences.
The long-term goals of my research project are to provide common safe spaces for these communities to tease out their own histories, creating valuable resonances between queer and racialized experiences in Canada. Historically, these specific communities have been most vulnerable when facing racial violence in Canada as well as homophobic violence from their cultural communities.