Introducing our Keynote Speakers

Jasbir Puar

is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Terrorist Assemblages, which was published by Duke University Press in 2007, winner of the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Professor Puar is the originator of the term “Homonationalism.” She has contributed to The Guardian of London, Art India, and Bully Bloggers and co-edited special issues of Social Text and GLQ. She is on the advisory board of the Audre Lorde Project. Professor Puar has been award the Edward Said Chair of American Studies at the American University in Beirut for 2012-1013.

Rabih Alameddine

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.”

Haneen MaiKey

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 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.