In the last two decades, the representation of Afghans and Afghanistan has been rendered to a people and the landscape is void of love and life. In the heteropatriarchal and orientalist depictions, Afghan women have remained as the historically oppressed and devotedly loveless while Afghan men move between the violently masculine and categorically weak. The non-binary, trans, and queer Afghans have remained invisible. These depictions have justified the continued war in Afghanistan and its subsequent everyday violence. Through a de/colonial and visual ethnography of Afghans and Afghanistan, Flowers, Love and the Landscape of Violence queers the war and Afghans’ lived experiences of violence in the country. Dr. Ahmad Qais Munhazim will offer alternative lenses and methodologies to understand Afghan masculinities, femininities, queerness, and the in-betweens.

Dr. Ahmad Qais Munhazim, genderqueer, Afghan, Muslim, and perpetually displaced, is an assistant professor of global studies at the Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Qais was born and raised in Kabul, Afghanistan. Qais’ work troubles borders of academia, activism, and art while exploring everyday experiences of displacements and war/conflicts in the lives of queer and trans-Afghans.

This event is a part of a series on Afghanistan presented by the Global Islamic Studies Center; cosponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, the Arab and Muslim American Studies Program, the Center for South Asian Studies, the Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Spectrum Center, the Department of American Culture, the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, and the Department of Middle East Studies.

For more events from the Global Islamic Studies Center at the University of Michigan, please visit https://ii.umich.edu/islamicstudies.