Kurdish queer studies: constructing and deconstructing a field

This special issue introduction aims to map out encounters between Kurdish Studies and Queer Studies. While the growing scholarship on Queer Studies in the Middle East offers theoretically and politically significant frameworks and analyses, Kurdish exper- iences and interventions are notably absent from this picture. As well as outlining the contributions to the special issue, this introduction offers reflections on how Kurdish Studies, Middle East Studies, and Queer Studies would benefit from a “Kurdish Queer” perspective. In doing so, the introduction and this special issue more widely mark a shift from “queer encounters in Kurdish Studies” to “Kurdish Queer Studies” as an emer- ging field of inquiry, without setting rigid boundaries around it.