Feminist Giant & The Strand Present: Sheima Benembarek + Mona Eltahawy

Moderating this discussion is founder and editor-in-chief of the newsletter Feminist Giant, Mona Eltahawy. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of Halal Sex here.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by Mar. 2 to request.

Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact [email protected]

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An unprecedented glimpse into the sex lives of female and gender-expansive Muslims living across Canada and the United States.

In the Muslim world, sex is permissible (or halal) only within the confines of marriage. Outside of wedlock, the act is considered haram, a sin of the faith. Girls are taught to protect their virginity; their mothers, if not forgoing “the talk” altogether, obscure the facts with elliptical language and metaphors.

So, what happens when immigrants and the children of immigrants set about pursuing an open and active sex life on a more sexually liberated continent, amid western peers and attitudes? The six deeply personal stories in Halal Sex attempt to answer this question, bringing a hushed conversation out into the open.

Within these pages you’ll meet Azar, a non-binary trans Sufi; Bunmi, a Nigerian navigating shame and Tinder; Eman, a lesbian stand-up comic in an interfaith marriage; Taslim, a virgin in her forties struggling to erect healthy boundaries; and Khadijah, an exotic dancer and sex worker.
With great empathy, Sheima Benembarek makes space for the honesty and vulnerability of each participant and handles their stories with gentleness and care. What emerges is a tapestry of a diverse Islam—encompassing a wide variety of cultural and religious and socioeconomic backgrounds—and a frank, feminist contribution to the advancement of Muslim sexual education and pleasure.

Feminist Giant is a free, reader-supported newsletter that provides weekly essays by Mona Eltahawy and bi-weekly Global Roundups of feminist resistance curated by contributor Samiha Hossain.

Photo credit: Daniel Neuhaus

Sheima Benembarek is a Moroccan Canadian journalist and media professional. She writes about social justice, immigrant narratives and intersectional feminism for a variety of publications including The Walrus, Maisonneuve, Literary Review of Canada, Chatelaine, Broadview and Vogue Arabia. In 2020, she was named one of the five RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writers. In the fall of 2024, she was the Asper Fellow in Media at Western University’s Faculty of Information and Media Studies where she taught ethical journalistic interviewing techniques for racialized sources. Currently, she works as the culture and society editor at The Conversation Canada. Her nonfiction book Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America was released on March 21, 2023 by Penguin Random House, Viking Canada, and was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize and appeared on bestselling lists.

Photo credit: Bob Rutledge

Mona Eltahawy is founder and editor-in-chief of the newsletter Feminist Giant. She is a public speaker on global feminism and is the author of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolu­tion (2015), which targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa, and The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls (2019), which took her disruption to patriarchy worldwide.

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