November 21, 2025

Khaltabeta Intimacies

by Nour Kamel

Nour Kamel feels out the bounds and borders of (a)sexuality in authoritarian Egypt while texting a friend.

This Mizna Online exclusive feature is published as part of Mizna 26.1: Kindred, link to purchase HERE.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

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Pleasure: something you take in in gasps, as everything falls apart around you, as everything bets on your nonexistence and hastens it, actually.

—Nour Kamel

Khaltabeeta Intimacies¹

Sexual: relating to intimate physical contact, in this instance. I had six sexual partners—all cis, straight(?) white(ish) men—before I could acknowledge to myself that I had never wanted any of them. Tried to erase them as soon as the body was through. They fulfilled the prophecy of sex, heterosexuality, white supremacy, and the exoticized role I was meant to play in all the porn and media consumed up til then.

Asexual: a sexual orientation on the margin of things, often likened to plants and robots. After I germinated into my asexuality and self, explored on my own homesoil, I had upward of thirty sexual partners of multiple genders and sexualities, of vanilla and kink, of one-times, multiple-times, weekly scheduled hookups, of roleplays and sneaking around because egypt. If I orient aspects of my life toward sex, does it make me no longer asexual?

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Orientations: that’s an ongoing conversation—with myself, with others, with the words of Sara. How is romance like a writing desk? I never thought I needed either to live my life write.

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Compulsory heterosexuality: is the thing Adrienne writes about in her essay. The weight of which every (queer) person I’ve ever met struggles with. Assimilate, recreate, the path to (hetero)happiness and contentment.

Compulsory sexuality: is the thing related to the Adrienne thing, but at its core. So many aces write about it, about how it gets tied into celibacy/religiosity, sex repulsion, disability. What if in the future there is no “default”—however far down you want to parse it. No one has to decide or undecide about fucking, what it means for their identity, who it aligns with, how it’s used to control our bodies as if we are things for use.

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Erotics: this one I got from Audre, and it clicked in the places where it was needed. That sex is sex, but it’s not always erotic. That erotic was my friend E looking me over contemplatively while I was reading and announcing, “I can see how someone would easily fall in love with you.” Erotic was the woman pastor on the train who handed me a bag of apples after I gave up my seat to an older man. Every time I invite myself into someone else’s kitchen after they’ve fed me and do their dishes wordlessly. When my nephew pokes the hanging flesh of my tummy he adores, that peeks out when I stretch, ever-expanding into every space that begs to be held. 

The handful of times I found sex erotic had nothing to do with, physically speaking, anything sexual.

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Archive: what’s been gathered, what remains, what you’re allowed to keep, and what you make of it. What is an archive but memories saved to be rifled through by a future melancholic self? When I talk about here, I talk about egypt. When I talk about having sex in egypt, it’s only ever been after acknowledged asexuality. Years abroad gave me space to be alone, but coming back forced me to figure out how to be among so many internal, external, oppressive, and regressive voices, constantly. Being part of egyptian society and choosing not to be part of what it looks like to be part of egyptian society puts you in the queer and odds. But so does having (none/premarital) sex and we number many.

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Erasure: having sex is an inherently transgressive, queer act in egypt. You only stick out to those who have a stake in the watching. Two people of the same gender rarely look suspicious in public or private spaces, so long as they keep things quiet and hetero/cis-passing. Not too effeminate, not too butch. No queer dating or hookup apps on your phone during tense political times, obviously. And if you’re going to use them—be safe, tell a friend, don’t use too many pictures, find mutuals, find someone who vouches for them, who knows them from another hookup, a friend of a friend, an IG follower of a follower. Verify verify verify, and verify again. If we get the chance to run our fingers through the archive, will it still hold all our conversations—all our digital lives—intact? Or is this just one more thing to be erased in time, like queerness over and over? The word “egypt” holds so much weight you’ll find it peppered in everything you read if the eye is looking. Abounds the (western) archive—removed from its context, but still.

This emptied place that does not love us, remains.

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Family: what the state uses to police us so they don’t have to. Each person I fuck in egypt transgresses against the institution of “family.” Which family I’m not sure, but a lot of them would definitely be scandalized if they knew about the fucking—even more so if they knew the whole asexual thing. You could easily avoid the sin and yet go crashing tongue first? Even though the crux of every family is the fucking, the procreating, the early marriages to save face or “family” name in front of others. We love to fuck, we’re known for it—ask anyone who’s seen our movies. I’ve only had one incident with one bawab, the rest don’t seem to care. But I keep my shoes clean and quick, my accent soft and foreign. I pick the easy ones, detached from family.

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Debauchery Law: it’s the recurrence, the habit, that makes it a crime. What counts as crime itself depends on the mood. Money may or may not be involved. How well your family is or is not connected dictates the punishment. If you’re to be made an example of. I can’t write about sex or queerness or anything without writing about egypt. Being here means being part of the facade, of pretending, of multi-consciousness and performances worthy of awards. No one knows who they are at any given time, but we know our prisons and the swift hand that quietly fills them.

Capitalism: so Sherronda raises a good point, re the idolatry of the young and married and fucking, and the confinement to social norms. To make more of us, to keep the numbers up, the intelligence down, the workhorse horsing. A sexually free society—with birth control and family planning, with sex across genders—wouldn’t be as easy to control. Who will produce and raise babies, if not you? To feed to the machine. Whole economies topple when we don’t do what we’re supposed to. Whole babies in Palestine and Sudan and Lebanon and Congo and Syria & & & made and torn to shreds for easy consumption.

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Love: I like the bell hooks definition. Or rather, the bits across the whole book that do more than just define it because . . . well, it’s love. The verb. And it takes so much practice and doing and failure and ache before you can even begin to offer it up to yourself, your communities. Anyone.

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Body Archive: could be, easily, confused also in this sense with a body count (which is where my mind went when reading Julietta). And no, no archive will restore you. Perhaps, in giving here a part of my archive, I acknowledge that bodies/people/others do not belong to me or anyone else. Their bodies and traces of their bodies mark me as much as anything else. I can barely remember to document them in real time, let alone archive. Besides, it all would be confession to (multiple) crimes—the body being the thing the state owns, really. What is a body but what they tell you it is? What is a body but what they decide you can and can’t do with it, and when and how and where, and with whom. We do it, over and over again, anyway. You imprint your taste on me, your perfumed lotion breaks me out, I touch myself to the memory of your shape nightly for weeks.

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Sex: not to make babies, not to combat family values and religion, not as adolescent assertion of independence, or individuality, or bodily autonomy, or power and ability over the other (as white supremacy would have it) but just to be—in a body, and all a body can do to feel. Jack points at queer sex as a refusal of adulthood and embracing the immature, embracing the playing of and with bodies rather than sex ascending everything else. That it’s transgressive when done just to be done. Regardless of gender, expansive, what is sex to whom? Is touching sex, yes, is licking, biting, hitting, yes, when you do this when you do that, when you hold me, when we look, smell, graze each other.

Is that not sex?

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Pleasure: something you take in in gasps, as everything falls apart around you, as everything bets on your nonexistence and hastens it, actually. I am pansexually active. I revel in the utmost of my body, but still I wrap myself in lies. Explaining to people you want to have sex with why you want to have sex with them when you experience absolutely no sexual attraction to their bodies is… burdensome. For other people. Everything about fucking, when it’s good, just feels fucking good.

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Romantic: a movie genre, mostly. But also how we move with each other sometimes without knowing why our hearts call us to do what we do for others. Aromantic is not to be confused with aromatic, which happens. I never felt alone or like I needed the scent of a partner on my skin, so I defaulted to aromantic. When I fell nose first into a romantic relationship, I realized most of my “friendships” had been romantic. That was my default mode by which I lived and loved: romantically. As in, I want you in my life forever. I want to see the depths of you, show me yours and I’ll show you mine. I want us all to move through the world just like this. Deeply, painfully, together.

Attraction: romantic, aesthetic, vibrational. For the most, when people say attraction, they mean sexual. I don’t feel that. That hunger isn’t there, no matter the attempts to kindle and sate. I feel attracted to so many yous, and the many ways you exist differently.

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Desire: in this instance the feeling of skin on skin action when you don’t crave any specific skin. When you have no skin in the proverbial compulsory sexuality game. When you perform (for) compulsory (hetero)sexuality while also going against everything the state and family morals dictate. When you go, in the night, to the houses of those you make bend to you, make bend you, make touch and touch skin that can’t get enough until it does. And I leave and want to be touched again until I don’t. I desire desire. To be held in the eyes of the other, cravingly. Selfishly. Wanted without wanting. Is this the trap of patriarchy/capitalism/sexuality politics? Or is this really the only way I can get off. Because how you look in your skin just doesn’t do it for me—but oh, when you look at me. Sherronda asks: what if we arrived at desire differently?

What if it was never first, but unfurled, like petals?

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Asexual: the muslim woman’s body and her sexlessness, the caricature of piety, chastity, resignation to men and not lovers. To be controlled. A complex image in our own society, one reinforced outside to ensure control and colonization, to free the oppressed sexless women with no bodily autonomy.

Hypersexual: the muslim woman’s body and its ravishing, breeding like animals in the white imagination. To be educated, stopped, curtailed, controlled. Palestinians have so many children, Palestinian children are the most endangered in the world. If we truly were animals, white people would care more and think less about our fucking.

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Definitions: I’d like to be the author of my own experiences in this world. Without anyone, including myself, categorizing me, invisibilizing me except when I say so, when I want to cease to be perceived. I want to crave you in the dark, where no one wonders if we’re fucking or not. Not a Schrödinger’s room full of want and/or fucking—just a room, full. The bodies within it go about unquestioned, doing whatever bodies want or need or desire to do. I want to want, and want and want and want whoever lies on the other side of this bed. And when they want me too, they turn, open. Wanting.

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Future: the word “lack” doesn’t appear here at all, I checked. But for the longest it ached and was felt. Broken appears three times, but only once in reference to the self. Lack yes, broken no. The former you’re made to feel deeply from everything you consume, everywhere you go, everyone you know—always making sure you know you haven’t quite got the essential, ephemeral “it”. The latter is a state of being, perhaps, the verb that either is or isn’t happening in you/to you. Others have broken parts of me, they mend. Others have continuously pointed to my lack, and it remains for them to finger, lacking. I stare at myself in confusion. Lack of what? I grow fatter and farther away from understanding that ache, one that made me question instead of break. I’ve gathered up everything I can find to make something more beautiful, something I have only seen this far. A fullness that even now, yes, is incomplete.

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1.  خلطة بيطة, bricolage or mixture of contrasting parts ↩︎

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Author’s Note: This text is an excerpt from a larger body of work, also entitled Khaltabeta Intimacies. The project began during a collective writing circle on “Queer Futures” (2023-24) that was facilitated & organized by Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research كحل: مجلة لأبحاث الجسد والجندر. 

Works cited, referenced, and lovingly read during the writing process:

• Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 631–660.
• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020).
• Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (Beacon Press, 2020).
• Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
• Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984), 53–59.
• bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (William Morrow, 2000).
• Ela Przybylo, Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality (Ohio State University Press, 2019).
• Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011).
• Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum Books, 2018).
• June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays (Basic Books, 2002).
• Paul B. Preciado, Can the Monster Speak? (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021).
• Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006).
• Sherronda J. Brown, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture (North Atlantic Books, 2022).
• Victoria Chang, Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions, 2021).
• Yanyi, The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press, 2019).

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