My dissertation, Being Both: Negotiating Identity, Surveillance, and Belonging within Queer Middle Eastern and Queer Muslim Communities in the United States, explores how queer Muslims and queer Middle Eastern people in the U.S. navigate overlapping systems of Islamophobia, racialization, and homotransphobia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and in digital spaces between 2020 and 2022, I analyze how surveillance and social scrutiny shape how people express identity and belonging across different audiences—family, friends, lovers, and online publics.

Page 99 captures the fraught intimacy of recognition online. I describe how a simple greeting—“I’m a Muslim too”—on a gay dating app can evoke both connection and fear. For queer Muslim men, such moments are charged with risk: being identified as Muslim might affirm kinship, but it can also expose them to outing, gossip, or familial shame. As one passage reads,

“Even though the risk may be small that screenshots of their Grindr profile and photos could be seen by family and friends, queer Muslim and Middle Eastern men are highly concerned about proactively managing the consequences if such a data breach were to occur. This anxiety about data insecurity shapes decisions they make about expressing ethnic and religious identity on gay dating apps and often limits their willingness to share personal information with other men who look like them until they know their interlocutor can be trusted.”

This moment distills a central theme of my project: the tension between visibility and safety. I call this dynamic observational discipline—the anticipatory awareness of being seen and the strategic effort to manage that gaze. Page 99 shows how technological infrastructures of dating and surveillance intersect with cultural and moral frameworks, producing a distinct affective terrain of cautious desire and mediated belonging.

Across the dissertation, queer Muslim and Middle Eastern participants navigate which versions of themselves can be legible and to whom. Through these micro-practices of watching and withholding, they create new possibilities for being both—queer and Muslim, Middle Eastern and American—within social worlds that often render such coexistence impossible.

Since completing the dissertation, I have been teaching business communication at Indiana University, where questions of identity, audience, and representation remain central to my work. Returning to page 99 reminds me that every act of communication, however brief, is also a negotiation of risk, recognition, and belonging.