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The essay investigates the interrelationships between Political Correcteness, stand-up comedy, and minority groups, by concentrating on the performances of an Arab-American disabled comedian, the "Palestinian Muslim virgin with cerebral palsy" Maysoon Zayid. Focusing on PC as a set of linguistic practices whose effect is the sanitarization of public discourse (especially when minorities are concerned), and stand-up comedy as a set of speech acts aiming at both the affirmation and/or the transgression of identity boundaries, the essay investigates the relationship between PC and comedy, and the way they interact within the three "spaces of minority" Zayid embodies: ethnicity (Arab-Americaness in the wake of 9/11), gender (womanhood and its relation to both Arab and American cultures), and disability, under-represented in American culture and the media.

The essay explores of how Arab-American and Arab-Muslim playwrights have reacted to the growth of Islamophobia, surveillance and discrimination within the US after 9/11. It also explores the pluralities of cultural, religious and political fractures that have characterized both the national and the international arena in the last two decades. Together with the criticism to the "state of Exception" in the work of playwrights like Youssef El Guindi and Rania Khalil, Arab-American and Muslim-American theatre engages with the Us/Them dichotomy Islamophobia relies on, and deconstructs this binary opposition by showing how, as shown in Betty Shamieh's Roar, Jamil Khoury's Precious Stones and in particular in Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced, cultural preconceptions and distorted representations form a blurred continuum in the history of minority cultures

Focusing on Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson's reportage Homeland (2004), this essay explores the de-construction of the discursive and cultural strategies of the "state of exception" used to depict 9/11 events and the dialectics between domestic and international politics and economies. The analysis focuses in particular on four elements: the concept of "Ground Zero" and "Homeland" and their use as lexical and symbolic catalysts of nationalism; the forms and the erasure of dissent; the commodification of 9/11 and the Iraqi war; and the relation between the national rhetoric and the transnational economy in the last two decades.