Transnational Queer Histories1-The Gay Girl in Damascus Hoax Progressive Orientalism and the Arab Spring

In June 2011 journalists discovered that Amina Arraf, whose blog A Gay Girl in Damascus was a major voice in Western coverage of the Arab Spring, was not a lesbian Muslim woman living in Damascus but Tom MacMaster, an American activist and graduate student in Scotland. The fraud rested on a form of Progressive Orientalism that reveals the vulnerability of progressive ideas to the very forms of Western domination they seek to oppose.

Andrew Orr is Associate Professor of Military History and Associate Director of Security Studies at Kansas State University.