February 9, 2026

Fann w Fenjein: Queer Falafel

Stephani Moukhaiber

Fann w Fenjein: Queer Falafel

On bodies, borders, and the politics of refusal

Foreword: Queer Falafel does not perform to entertain comfort. Their work exists to unsettle, confront, and rupture the white gaze, colonial memory, and gender binaries.

A Lebanese multidisciplinary artist working across performance, sound, text, and visuals, Queer Falafel operates from the body as both archive and weapon. Their practice draws from lived experiences of queerness, migration, and racialization, rejecting institutional palatability and exposing how fetishization and tokenization function even within supposedly progressive cultural spaces.

In this conversation, Queer Falafel speaks candidly about adapting their work across geographies, refusing to educate audiences who demand explanations, navigating the contradictions of institutional access, and reclaiming bodily agency as an act of survival rather than spectacle. What emerges is not a manifesto, but a refusal to exist on anyone else’s terms.

Stephani Moukhaiber

For readers encountering your work for the first time: who is Queer Falafel, and how do you describe what you do across performance, music, text, and visual practice?

Queer Falafel is my artist name, but it’s not really a persona. It’s me. I’m a Lebanese multidisciplinary artist working with performance, visuals, music, and text. I didn’t decide to be political:my work is political because I exist.

I’m queer. I’m racialized. I’m living in Europe. That alone makes the work political. What I do is decolonial in the sense that I’m constantly deconstructing myself, realizing the hierarchies I’m trapped in, and exposing how they shape the way bodies like mine are consumed.

The name itself — Queer Falafel — is deliberate. Queerness is “trendy” in the art world. Migration is “trendy”. Even certain forms of suffering are “trendy”. I leaned into that oxymoron consciously, knowing exactly how Orientalism and queer fetishization work in cultural spaces.

I’m anti-institutional. Very radical. But I’m also aware of my hypocrisy. I don’t believe in the fantasy of dismantling institutions from within — I’m an abolitionist who still moves through institutions when necessary. I don’t pretend otherwise. I’m fine holding that contradiction.

Your work moves between live performance, electro-Arab sets, installations, and political text. How did this multidisciplinary language take shape, and what does it allow you to say that a single medium could not?

It’s just my way, like I realized this is my mode of expression, because I’m very multifaceted.

It’s not a strategy, it’s how I exist. I’ve worked with the body, with music, with visuals. I direct everything I do. I produce everything I do. Layering mediums is how I find myself.

The body is always the starting point. My work is visceral and body-based, but I don’t leave it floating in abstraction. I place the body in a political and visual context. I’m very direct. I don’t hide behind metaphors.

Text matters to me. Sometimes I subtitle, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I speak Arabic without translation on purpose. That’s intentional. Not everything needs to be accessible. Not everything needs to be explained.

There’s a strategy in withholding. There’s care in deciding who something is for.

Queer Falafel at Adira Drag Festival in Berlin, Taken by CerenSaner

You adapt your work depending on where you perform. How do audiences respond differently across geographies?

It changes a lot. I adapt constantly. I don’t believe in copy-pasting the same performance everywhere.

When I performed in Beirut, I wasn’t doing what I do in Europe. I was talking about similar things, but to a very different audience. I’m not coming from Europe to give lessons or hatred. That would be violent.

In Europe, reactions vary. In the Basque Country, people were very politicized. They didn’t take things personally. Their history matters. In France, everything becomes personal. Once, I simply read out the list of countries France colonized — with music in the background — and people walked out. They found it provocative. I was just reading facts.

I’m used to being told, “I didn’t know France colonized Lebanon.” Hearing that over and over affects you.

Different places trigger different emotions in me. Sometimes I feel empowered. Sometimes it hurts. I’ve learned to take care of myself. At the end of the day, I do the work for myself first. People can resonate, be shocked, leave — all of that is part of it.

You speak out strongly against white supremacy and colonial histories. How do these power structures still shape everyday life for queer and feminized Arab bodies?

It depends on class, passports, and mobility. Someone with access to movement lives a completely different reality than someone trying to escape without papers.

There’s also deep fetishization, especially in hegemonic gay spaces — spaces that are supposedly progressive but are actually very cis, white, and chauvinistic. They reproduce the same hierarchies while claiming inclusivity.

I’m aware of my own positionality too. I’m non-binary, but I’m often read as a cis gay man. That comes with privilege. Trans and visibly non-conforming bodies experience violence differently — more intensely.

Even spaces that promote “intersectionality” are deeply elitist. They’re separatist. They perform inclusion without actually redistributing power. The people booking, curating, and deciding, they’re still mostly white.

I get booked for “queer migrant festivals” as if my work only exists within a theme of suffering. As if it’s not valid on its own.

You describe your position as “Genderfuck.” What does that mean beyond aesthetics?

Before anything political, it’s identitarian. Gender binarism was imposed through colonialism and white supremacy. Before that, many societies recognized multiple genders — some even revered people who existed between categories.

Genderfuck is a refusal of the lie that this binary is natural. It’s not. It was engineered to serve capitalism: inheritance, nuclear families, control over reproduction.

I was educated as male. That doesn’t disappear because I reject gender norms. Genderfuck isn’t pretending power disappears. It’s constantly working against how it lives inside you.

Intersex people are still mutilated today because of binary thinking. That’s not abstract. That’s violence.

You deal with complex political issues, yet your work remains visceral and immediate. What role do emotion, movement, and sound play in helping audiences connect to those ideas?

I don’t consider myself an activist. I’m politicized, but I’m expressing discoveries that affect me personally.

I don’t perform to convince. I externalize what I’m processing. People feel it whether they want to or not. Many leave my shows. Others write to me afterward — mostly non-white people, but white people too. I’m raw. I have a lot of emotions. I don’t sanitize them.

People expect nudity, shock, spectacle — and sometimes that happens — but that’s the least important part of my work. The real discomfort comes from what I say.

How do you deal with backlash, especially from white audiences?

It used to affect me a lot. Now, less.

I’m not responsible for educating anyone. I’m not here to explain racism to people who benefit from it. When someone tells me I’m being “reverse racist,” I don’t engage anymore. I’ve done that labor already.

My work helped me reclaim bodily agency, the right to not explain, not soften, not justify.

And this is really the most like body agency that I felt, that my work has helped me reclaim and also get a lot of beautiful debates, some of them hard, and some of them where they make me see things that obviously, you know, but it’s this is amazing, you know?

That refusal is powerful.

Queer Falafel at MYTO in London, taken by Dimitri Djuric

A recurring thread in your practice is the refusal of fetishization — particularly of feminized, racialized, and queer Arab identities. What strategies do you use to dismantle this gaze without reproducing it for consumption?

I realized that it’s a process. I was falling definitely into this fetishization for the white gaze, even if I would come and cut it and do my discourse, which was kind of a transition for me, but I was still falling into it. That’s part of the process. You don’t escape the gaze overnight.

Eventually, I stopped performing things I wouldn’t wear or embody in my daily life. I realized certain choices were for white consumption, so I dropped them.

Moving to Berlin and performing more for people from my region changed everything. I started performing fully in Arabic, without subtitles. When Arabs are in the room, you can’t perform caricature. You can’t fake it.

Some of my earlier work was still made for white people, even when it was confrontational. I’m done with that now. My audience might still be mostly white because of geography — but I don’t cater to them anymore.

If they don’t get it, that’s fine.This work is for us.

Is there anything you feel hasn’t been covered, something you want to leave readers with?

The rave is not the real revolution, we’re not in the 90’s anymore.

Neoliberalism kills.

You will never be “not racist.”
You work on being radically anti-racist — constantly.

And drink water. Hydrate.

Stephani Moukhaiber

Stephani Moukhaiber is the founder and CEO of Al Rawiya, a media company amplifying voices from the Levant and its diaspora. She also leads Al Rawiya Studio, the creative and strategic arm of the company, providing branding, content, and media services to clients. In addition, she serves as the Director of Programs and Operations at the 2048 Foundation, overseeing program strategy, communications, grants management, and operational excellence. Originally, Stephani worked as an organizational development consultant specializing in workplace strategy, including roles at global tech and consulting firms.