Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir

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But Lamya is open about their struggles, saying early on in the book that they are 14years old when they want to die. They go into why they feel like this – that they are “acutely ashamed” and “mortified” of their feelings for women.

HIJAB BUTCH BLUES | Kirkus Reviews HIJAB BUTCH BLUES | Kirkus Reviews

Advocates for queer visibility on Christopher Street Day 2021 (CSD) in Stuttgart, Germany. Picture by Christian Lue.This is really an unforgettable memoir that is full of heart, well written and teaches you so much about life. I think the author did a brilliant job of taking us into their world and I enjoyed every bit of it. Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas and My Butch Career: A Memoir by Esther Newton (2000, 2018)

Lamya H

queer support for palestine On Palestinian Liberation Is Queer Liberation " Thank you Kayla, this was so important and good. Ignore the weird spam comments that deliberately misread the piece -…" Raw and unflinching, Hijab Butch Blues heralds the arrival of a truly original voice, asking powerful questions about gender and sexuality, relationships, identity and faith, and what it means to build a life of one's own. These are the stories that make the headlines, though, and given the statistics about LGBTQIA+ people considering or dying by suicide – LGBTQIA+ young people in particular, I wouldn’t be surprised if those statistics are a vast underestimate. I's nice to see how much of how she processes her life experiences is linked to the Quran, but then she veers off into blasphemy.Can I ask what was going through the author's book when she wrote this? Because the blurb alone has left me disgusted. This book is blatant disrespect to Islam and God and all the Prophets. How dare someone compare God to any mortal concept? How dare someone disrespect Maryam A.S. like that? Because she says she has not been touched by a man, that means shes lesbian? How on earth those that make sense when the context is that shes PRGNENT? This author is using the Prophets and Mayram A.S. to justify her sins and make herself feel better and she is disrespecting her religion and everything is stands for. The book is titled as an ode to Leslie Feinberg’s award-winning 1993 novel, Stone Butch Blues. Like its inspiration, Hijab Butch Blues delves into what it means to be a gender nonconforming activist, while navigating the biases and prejudices held in queer circles. There are people who will call this book blasphemous, and who will be incredulous as to how a Queer Muslim woman can compare her struggles to those of the Prophets. But there will also be those readers whose minds will be opened, their perspectives broadened, and their binary ways of thinking dismantled as they engage in critical thinking beyond the parameters of whatever version of faith they may have been indoctrinated with. Even in multiracial and politically progressive circles, Lamya’s hypervisibility as a Muslim others them. At a queer gathering, the author recalls being singled out by one person who admits he was glad to have spoken to Lamya, and that otherwise he would have “studiously avoided the religious Muslim in the room”. Lamya’s] determination to fight for a better world is inspiring…will leave readers feeling uplifted and empowered.” — Queer Space Magazine

Hijab Butch Blues — Lamya H

sketchyblondes On Work and Class in “The Haunting of Bly Manor” " I loved the show (and maybe relate to self-sacrificing Dani a bit too much)(I cried)(I was all about that ending),…"Lamya H: I want the audience to come away with the sense of how messy faith is, but how that mess is also generative. And not just faith, actually, but queerness, race – all these things are messy. The lived experience of these things is never linear, never simple. But complexity in and of itself is something to aspire to, because it makes space for different kinds of lives. It makes space for queerness, among other things. It allows an expansiveness that is important to me. It’s taken me a while to realise that, but it’s something I wanted to convey. And also just this idea of love being more than romantic love, and expanding out to the love you can have for your community, your chosen family, your partner, the people around you. [It’s about] expanding the notion of love and queering the idea of love itself.

Hijab Butch Blues | SpringerLink Lamya H.: Hijab Butch Blues | SpringerLink

Lamya, who is gender nonconforming, also writes of how the “rigidity of gender” follows them “like a punishment everywhere, across oceans and continents”. The author writes about feeling patronised by a friend who says Lamya would “make a beautiful trans man”. She reimagines Prophetic tales in contemporary, colloquial language, and interweaves lessons she extracts from the Quran with her daily life experiences. In a chapter on Allah, Lamya recounts her questions about the nature of God, which she began asking as a 6-year-old. Is God a woman? A man? A pious religious teacher told her that Allah is not a man or a woman. This was a mystery and a revelation, and it helped her in later years as her family attempted to mold her in traditionally gendered ways. She learned how important it was “for me to use the pronoun they for God,” she writes, “my God, whom I refuse to define as a man or a woman, my God who transcends gender.” After moving to the United States for university, Lamya recalls “deciphering the hierarchies of this country” – from white supremacy to Arab and Muslim names alone rousing suspicion. Lamya writes that their “brown hijabi Muslim body is seen as scary, disempowered, both hypervisible and invisible at the same time”.What makes this book so remarkable is Lamya's integrity both as a Muslim trying to create a lens that allows her to see her faith broadly and affirmingly and as a scholar and political thinker aware of the ways colonialism and hierarchies of color shape our world. Chapter by chapter, readers will feel a growing appreciation for Lamya’s intelligence, eloquence and courage. Along the way, we learn vivid details about her life and outlook—that, for example, she was a diligent, bright student with a disruptive sense of humor; that her parents immigrated to an Arab nation from a South Asian country for better opportunities and, as a result, that she and her brother experienced bias because of their brown skin; that she was immediately uncomfortable in New York’s gay bar scene and struggled to feel “authentically gay”; that she is ambivalent about America; that she loves her parents and feels OK not coming out to them. Worse still, Lamya is belittled by family for wearing hijab. In a toxic mix of Islamophobia and classism, Lamya is told by relatives that they look like a servant in hijab, that hijab is not in their culture and would hinder assimilation in the United States. Distinct and interesting in its collaborative approach, Gender Failure was co-written by musicians and writers Rae Spoon and Ivan E. Coyote and interrogates and tears down gender binaries and gender roles throughout. One chapter, called “Do I Still Call Myself a Butch?” by Coyote is just two sentences long: “Yes. Of course I still do.” Coyote also wrote Tomboy Survival Guide, a memoir told in stories that touches on coming-of-age butchness.