Mourning Sarah Hegazi: Grief and the cultivation of queer Arabness

Abstract

In this article, we engage in a discursive analysis and affective reading of written and recorded responses to the suicide of Sarah Hegazi, an Egyptian queer feminist communist who took her own life in exile in Canada in the summer of 2020. In the aftermath of Sarah’s suicide, queer Arabs across the Middle East and North Africa as well their diaspora publicly mourned her death in an unprecedented way through an abundance of social media posts, blogs, articles, twitter and Instagram hashtags, and vigils. Some mourned her as a friend and comrade, as chosen kin, but most did not know Sarah personally. In what follows, we explore what it was about Sarah’s life and death that inspired such a response from queer Arabs, and what was this collective mourning productive of.