Join International House as we partner with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Old Town School of Folk Music to present an evening with Kabareh Cheikhats, a Moroccan band that subverts gender norms through their unique approach to the music of “Cheikhat girls.” Culturally significant yet stigmatized, this style of popular music lives on through Kabareh Cheikhats, who pay homage to the Cheikhats through drag performance. The event will feature a performance followed by a conversation moderated by Dr. Hoda El Shakry (Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago).

Moderator bio: Hoda El Shakry is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She is a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first century cultural production from North Africa and the Middle East, with an emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Her interdisciplinary research explores Arabic and Francophone literatures, Islamic philosophy, film and visual culture, speculative fiction, aesthetic theory, as well as gender and sexuality. She is the author of The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb (Fordham University Press, 2020) which was awarded the MLA’s 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies.

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

This event is co-sponsored by the International House Global Voices Program, the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, and the U.S. Department of Education.