Hyphenated Desires: Contesting Heteronormativity and Belonging in Zaina Arafat's (2020) You Exist Too Much

This article examines Zaina Arafat's You Exist Too Much (2020) as a postcolonial queer work that explores the intersection of Arab female desire, displacement, and bisexual identity within conditions of cultural and emotional exile. While existing scholarship on Arab diasporic literature largely focuses on themes of exile, belonging, and national identity, and queer theory often relies on Western paradigms of sexual liberation, little critical attention is paid to bisexuality and ambivalence within postcolonial Arab narratives. Addressing this gap, the analysis examines the shaping of the protagonist's subjectivity at the intersection of familial ostracization, Arab patriarchy, and Western discourses of othering, producing patterns of oscillation, conflict, and ambivalence. The article draws on postcolonial and queer theories to show the novel's aestheticization of shame and fragmentation as central to the formation of postcolonial queer subjectivity. Through doing this, the article contributes to postcolonial literary and queer studies through accentuating the ways contemporary Arab writing negotiates the politics of sexuality, affect, and belonging within transnational contexts. The analysis shows that Arafat's novel exposes the intricacies of existing "too much" in cultures that continue to police both Arabness and desire instead of reproducing Western paradigms of liberation.