Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir

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Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir

Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir

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Her work has appeared in The Independent, Refinery29, Business Insider, Teen Vogue, Vogue Arabia, The National, Luxury, Mojeh, Grazia Middle East, GQ Middle East, gal-dem and more. That’s a huge responsibility, because you’re figuring yourself out outside of a context that people have defined for you previously. While different in scope and the identities it explores, if you’re interested in additional books that touch on gender and pregnancy/parenthood, check out The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthoodby Krys Malcolm Belc. And I think this is the result not only of racism and homophobia in the publishing industry but also of intracommunity biases against gender nonconforming and masc-of-center Black lesbians. 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.

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H - BookPage Book review of Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H - BookPage

And in Hijab Butch Blues, it’s dispossession that empowers Lamya to challenge this mindset – in themself and others. Definitely shout out any books you’d like to recommend in the comments, even if they don’t necessarily explicitly touch on butch identity! As is the nature of a memoir, many topics are discussed and could be considered trigger warnings for many people. Lamya starts Quran study readings with a Queer Muslim group and discovers that Muslims can pray side-by-side instead of the traditional male in front of the female hierarchy.Audre Lorde famously wrote in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name of her experience going to the lesbian bar The Bagatelle: “For me, going into the Bag alone was like entering an anomalous no-woman’s land. Lamya’s classmates read aloud about Maryam during childbirth, where she says that she wished she had died. The memoir swings, pendulum-like, between her own story and her reflections on the stories at the heart of Islam, stories that shape her understanding of what it means (or can mean) to be female and Muslim. As the author examines her evolving relationship to her religion, she also vibrantly explores what it means to live with an open-minded, open-hearted activist seeking to change the world for the better. No one, not even the prophets, questioned Allah's (swt) gender, SO WHY ON GOD'S GREEN EARTH SHOULD YOU?

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H | Waterstones Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H | Waterstones

In Hijab Butch Blues , Lamya takes us on a trip through time and space as we follow their complex relationship with sexuality and gender. But none of the flaws with writing could diminish the importance of this memoir for me at a personal level and I hope this book gets more buzz than it's done so far. The Quranic story of Maryam, who “doesn’t like men,” gave the author courage, but when she began wearing hijab to honor Maryam, non–hijab-wearing girls dismissed her. The Quran grants a great deal of importance to Mary, and in my experience this translates to a great deal of respect for Mary among Muslims. That’s also part of why I wrote this book, because it felt like a way to put stories out there into the world about alternative ways to live.

But complexity in and of itself is something to aspire to, because it makes space for different kinds of lives. Hijab Butch Blues might be Lamya H’s first work of autobiography, but they have been publishing essays on queer Muslim subjectivities and prison abolition since 2014. Through its 10 chapters, the memoir generally follows the arc of Lamya’s life, beginning when she was a young girl in an international Islamic school, discovering her attraction to women and sometimes feeling suicidal.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
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