Queer Muslim Environmental Futurism(s)

Abstract

This article demonstrates how queer Muslim intellectual and experiential frameworks subvert Euro-American hegemonic claims to nature and sexuality. Through Orientalism, Euro-American hegemony essentializes dichotomies over a linear conception of time, stereotyping Muslims and nature in the twenty-first century as temporally stagnant in comparison to Western LGBTQ+ rights or technological progress. Because many queer Muslims exist at the margins of the Orientalist binary, between stereotypes of Western LGBTQ+ modernization and Muslim homophobic regression, they are especially positioned to unlearn Orientalist constructions. Analyzing there are gardens at the margins, a mixed-media visual exhibition by queer Muslim artist Saba Taj, the author examines how queer Muslims reorient their relationships to space, time, and Allah’s creation. Drawing on these new space and time orientations as a form of futurism(s), the author uses Taj’s work to theorize Queer Muslim Environmental Futurism(s) (QMEF), which can dismantle Orientalist binaries that essentialize gender, Islam, and constructions of Nature. QMEF presents one of many ways for queer Muslims to redefine their relationships with Muslim traditions and with nonhuman creation.