Gender(ed) Wars in Disciples of Passion

In this essay, I read Hoda Barakat’s Disciples of Passion through a queer lens, framing the discussion through the literary reception of Barakat’s work. Queer affects materialize through Barakat’s memory-generated, discontinuous narrative. I suggest that the narrative reveals the narrator’s sexual desire for the beloved to be intertwined with his desire for a preborn, presocial, and unsexed body. The narrator’s killing of the beloved, and his subsequent (re)construction of her character through memory, cannot be pulled apart from his own struggle to approximate gendered ideals of desire and embodiment. My reading locates the beloved simultaneously inside and outside the narrator—an observation which may open the space for an alternative storyline in Barakat’s novel.