ABSTRACT
The protests and revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region define and exceed the imperialism's new manifestations and challenge the ‘stabilities’ and ‘business as usual’ in their moves to make anew the Arab region. Emerging revolutionary sexual poetics, I argue, ride the transformative power of the erotic while resisting and interrupting tired gendered and universal portrayals of the local-feminine backward East region and masculine rational forward West-global. The practical and conceptual shifts of the protests in the MENA present an energeia that disrupts ‘business as usual’ capitalism and substantively transforms power and sexual relations. The region's poetry (poems, slogans, songs) is an essential driver of this energeia which contests fetishized syndromes of transformation. In fact, in the MENA region, sex and poetics are major contestation sites of alternative ethical imperatives of being in time including practical and conceptual shifts in world-making projects.
