Last Post: Hanna

Professor Hanna wrapped up the lecture series with a thought-provoking lecture on love and desire in the East Levantine area. During the lecture series, we have looked at love and desire from a variety of angles including heterosexual, physiological, philosophical, poetical, and historical aspects of love; however all under the assumption that through the medium of literature and film we can express and study love without bonds. Hanna demonstrated that not all geographical locals maintain that freedom. In places like Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Lebanon people are not allowed to write against the patriarchal society or a purely heterosexual union. Huda Barakut is one of the few books written recently on homosexual love.
The woman writer was sympathetic to the cause of gay people in the Levantine area, whose desires are dismissed as "boy love" and nothing more, but she also had she own agenda in writing. The women there are so suppressed by the men that any chance to destabilize their patriarchal structure needs to be seized if only through symbolic actions, such as the gay man raping the widow upstairs. Other women who openly wrote against men, like the ones who published emails about a trip to the mall where men were more focused on each other than the women in disguise, or Layla Baalbaki, who wrote against children as a perpetuation of male dominance over women, had to flee the country and had their books banned. I loved the fact that through literature women are able to express their opinions and raise awareness of inequality for both gays and women and in Western Europe and America about the injustice they are suffering. Like in the book 1984, how can people express homosexual love when the very word for it is taken away? Without literature and the ability to quickly spread ideas to other people and parts of the world nothing will change and the people who could help to make a difference will be left in the dark. In the past, books were a conduit for change and progress, and I believe they can still serve that same purpose today.