Beshouy Botros

I am a PhD student interested in sex and science in Northern Africa, and elsewhere. Animated by feminist, queer and trans studies, I am preparing a dissertation that narrates histories of science and sexuality antedating the coincidence of trans medicine in Northern Africa, that is the birth of gender clinics in Cairo and Casablanca in the mid-twentieth century. This project probes what it meant to “have sex” and “have a sex” between Egypt and the Maghreb in the long nineteenth century Before Trans Medicine, in order to understand how the binary oppositions of male/female and East/West were mutually constituted then, and how they might be unraveled today. 

My research has been supported by the Center for Black, Brown and Queer Studies, the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers, the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration, the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies, the European Studies Council, and the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies. My written work has appeared in Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies, Technology Power, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Queer and Trans in Religion.  

I graduated from Pomona College where I studied History. I was an Erasmus Mundus Fellow in the Women and Gender Studies departments of Utrecht University and the University of Granada from 2018 to 2020. Before starting graduate school, I worked for the Arab Film Festival and the Middle Eastern Immigrant and Refugee Alliance. I am a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow.

At Yale I also work at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, where I have been using the tools of virtual reality, photography and printmaking to think through and restage the Napoleonic Description de L’Egypte.