Welcome to my blog, where throughout the semester I will be researching and discussing sexuality and gender in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). I am interested in learning about the laws surrounding women and the LGBTQ community, as well as discovering the community attitudes regarding minority identities in the MENA region. As a Political Science and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies double major, I am always looking for ways that my disciplines overlap and I feel that this topic will be a very interesting crossroads of the two.

I feel that there can be a strong sentiment in the United States that the Middle East and North Africa is a strict, conservative and intolerant part of the world, and is often said in the same breath of praising the United States of being an accepting and progressive state. I want to see for myself if that is really the case, or if the laws and attitudes vary greatly from country to country.