“Queerness” in One Thousand and One Nights: Manifestations of Gender and Sexuality Anonymous College

One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling (hereafter 1001 Nights) is Hanan al-Shaykh’s reinterpretation of the popular oral tales that continue to enchant and inspire audiences today. Through her re-imagining of Shahrazad’s story and the interlocking narratives she weaves, al-Shaykh presents a definition of “queerness” rooted in the notions of gender and sexuality, both within and beyond the text of the novel. In turn, al-Shaykh demonstrates the countless ways in which queerness—as manifest in the novel—subverts the conventional cisnormative, heteronormative hegemony, consequently tearing down the patriarchal structures that attempt to confine it through means of abjection. For these reasons, I consider 1001 Nights to be a queer text, particularly in showcasing how the cis-heteropatriarchy appropriates their misfortunes to further uphold colonialist dichotomies of gender and sexuality, as opposed to generating a textual realm in which queer identities can flourish independently from their oppressors. Thus, 1001 Nights serves as al-Shaykh’s argument that the narrative “default” was built on the backs of queer voices, existing in diametrical opposition to the same communities they are leeching off.

At the intratextual level,...