The Reluctant Queer

2016

Thesis. M.A. American University of Beirut. Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies, 2016. T:6468

2019

Since the last decades, the Middle East has been portrayed as hostile towards homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people. The overall public opinion represents them by facing suppression, whereas marginalization seems to be omnipresent and a suffer for Arabs. Although these statements are mainly spread by media and organizations from Western perspectives, there is more going on concerning political, religious and social points of view to such underexposed issue in the academic literature of Middle Eastern studies. This bachelor’s thesis revolves around the (non-)existent LGBT+ rights in a specific regional context of the Middle East, namely Lebanon’s post-civil war society. Regarding this subject, recent legal and social developments make it a pioneer country of human and sexual rights in the region of the Middle East. Nowadays Lebanon is commonly considered “the safest resort” for LGBT+ communities, but still political, legal and even social conditions affect their behavior, way of life and position in society. Therefore, this research mainly deals with a historical, political and social analysis of the present- day sectarian-divided Lebanon, with a specific focus on its relationship with processes of legalization of LGBT+ rights. Additionally, it questions Western notions about gender and sexuality concerning advocating LGBT+ rights, linking these to implemented orientalist and colonialist discourses and to the outcomes of a globalized world nowadays. First, the thesis introduces the methodology. It addresses academic methods and materials that are analyzed in detail for this study. Furthermore, it acknowledges encountered difficulties, limitations, and possible controversies as to terminology, scientific or sociological concepts, and transliteration of terms from the Arabic language during the research process. Secondly, the study sets up a historical framework, in order to understand the current sociopolitical environment, which determines and influences the fate of Lebanon’s sexual minorities. It begins with growing intervention and then the colonization of the Levant by foreign powers. Besides, it links past legislation with Lebanon’s political complexity, affecting (non-)existent LGBT+ rights in the country.2 Furthermore, the thesis mentions evolutions in politics, law and society between independence and pre-civil war period shortly. The historical framework focuses primarily on the post-civil war context in Lebanese politics and society, as this is the point of interest in growing attention towards LGBT+ rights. Consequently, the next chapter introduces a theoretical framework, which complies with scientific and sociocultural concepts of sexology, either Western or Arabic notions. Furthermore, it focuses on Islamic legal thought and views on homosexuality, bisexuality and transgender people, as well as it analyses (mis-)interpretations of concepts in orientalist and colonialist discourses. Because of this, the study allows us to leave the “popular” Western discourse, which blames religion as the main cause for homophobia and transphobia, and therefore complies with substantiated arguments. The thesis’ body consists of multiple examinations of existent, interchangeable or even oppositive attitudes towards LGBT+ rights. Firstly, it explores Lebanon’s domestic and international legislation in-depth, specifically criminalization of homosexuality with regard to Article 534 in the Penal Code. Moreover, it addresses political and social consequences for both the individual and the community of experiencing nonconformity in contrast to a mainly heteronormative society. Last, the thesis offers positive alternatives for laws, stigmatization and marginalization of sexual minorities. By framing this, it also focuses on local and cross-regional organizations that advocate LGBT+ rights. Additionally, it discusses positive and negative effects of civil society organizations and LGBT+ organizations on the level of the individual and the community.

2018

This article examines how LGBTQ individuals in Beirut articulate discourses of progress, modernity, and exceptionalism in light of the regional geopolitical situation. While transnational discourses portray Beirut as an open and cosmopolitan city in the Arab World, the study focuses on how LGBTQ individuals engage with and negotiate these discourses in their everyday lives. The author examines the gap between discourses of Beiruti openness and exceptionalism, and the realities of exclusion experienced by LGBTQ individuals in Beirut. Focusing on unequal access to space, the author asks, for whom is Beirut cosmopolitan and gay-friendly? Drawing on ethnographic observations and 20 life-history interviews with LGBTQ individuals in Beirut, the author finds that LGBTQ individuals in Beirut create relational understandings of modernity and cosmopolitanism that situate Beirut in relation to other Arab cities, rather than just Euro-American cities. In addition, gender normativity and class shape LGBTQ individuals' access to several types of spaces. Finally, it is suggested that scholars must be attentive to celebratory discourses of exceptionalism and cosmopolitanism of places, and conceptualize them as relational and contextual designations which obscure inequalities that characterize those places.

In this article, I analyse discourses that have been circulating in a number of Euro-American journalistic articles, gay travelogues and an international gay tour guide since 2005, which present Beirut as a new gay tourist destination. Since representations in gay travelogues often trade in imagined 'sexual utopias', promise encounters and the 'discovery' of unfamiliar and 'exotic' settings with other non-heterosexual men, I explore how both Beirut and the Lebanese are represented and made intelligible. I argue that even though these representations depart from a binary distinction between East/ West and Self/Other, they are still premised on Orientalist depictions of both place and people. However, these depictions are complex as they rely on and produce what I call 'fractal Orientalism', or 'Orientalisms within the Orient', and essentialized, yet relational, understandings of both 'tourists' and 'locals'. Hybridity and liminality become central, whereby Beirut is presented as safe but dangerous, and glamorous but war-torn, and the non-heterosexual Lebanese are racialized and represented as sexually available (in private) but discreet (in public). These representations rely heavily on linear narratives of progress, where progress is assessed in terms of 'tolerant' attitudes towards homosexuality, the presence of a Western-constituted 'gay identity', gay-friendly spaces and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer organizations. Finally, I argue that these depictions, despite attempting to make Beirut and non-heterosexual Lebanese men intelligible, produce monolithic and essentialist understandings of both, which fail to take into account the complexities and intersections of gender, race, class and sexualities.

In this article, I explore two contending claims in the literature on LGBTQ organizing in the Global South. Whereas some theorists argue that LGBTQ groups in the Global South uncritically apply ''Western'' understandings of sexuality in their LGBTQ organizing, others claim that a global LGBTQ identity and community truly exists, which despite taking on different forms, follows one similar ''developmental'' trajectory. Drawing on the cases of the two Lebanese LGBTQ social movement organizations (SMOs) Helem and Meem, I argue that the present literature homogenizes such organizations and does not account for the complexities, differences and diversities in their activism. By analyzing their respective websites, online publications and published online speeches from 2004 to 2011, I argue that Meem and Helem's different strategic choices and definitions of collective queer identities both simultaneously contest and engage with dominant models of Euro-American LGBTQ organizing. I illustrate that, despite their different organizing strategies, both Helem and Meem attempt to remain rooted in a local context by highlighting their multiple positions and intersectional struggles. In addition, I show that geopolitical context plays a central role in their collective identity deployment since the two groups highlight different aspects of themselves in relation to local and global audiences. Finally, I use this case to point out the limitations of the present literature and the need for research that operates with a more complex sense of LGBTQ groups in the Global South.

Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, 2020

The culture wars over homosexuality in the Middle East are studied here in the context of the theoretical debate on culture in International Relations and, more specifically, through a critical examination of postcolonial international theory. The paper argues that, although postcolonialism can offer a useful framework, it also has, in its poststructuralist variants, significant limitations in addressing the controversial issues surrounding homosexuality as cultural battleground in the Middle East. These limitations derive from an unconvincing interpretation of the relationship between the Middle East and modernity; and a problematic approach towards moral agency. The paper serves a dual purpose. Through the use of the empirical material, it furthers the debate within postcolonial international theory by bringing evidence to bear in support of its humanist or materialist strands. The theoretical discussion, in turn, by highlighting the intertwining of culture and power in the debates on homosexuality, strengthens the case for respecting homosexual rights in the Middle East region.

London Review of International Law, 2014

This article explores what is at stake in contemporary practices of locating homophobia, as expressed in debates surrounding the Ugandan Anti Homosexuality Act. Problematising both neo-Orientalist representations of homophobia in Uganda and critical responses thereto, it draws on materialist, postcolonial and queer approaches to offer an account of the transnational production of homophobia that nonetheless accounts for its local resonance and resilience.

Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, 2017

This paper heeds Jasbir Puar's call to supplement an intersectional analysis with an exercise of assemblage when examining identity politics. It argues that asylum organizations' unwillingness to account for the interplay between the receiving state (in this case Lebanon) and the lived reality of (Syrian) LGBT refugees results in a " one size fits all " narrative that forces the latter into a more visible and potentially death-instigating corporeality. The interplay between refugees and the receiving state is summed up in the elitist discourse of a " Syrian neo-invasion " that results in the revival of an " authentic Lebanese masculinity. " Whereas the Syrian refugee is vilified as " rapist " in a heterosexual context, they are emasculated as " necessarily bottom " in a same-sex one. This discourse is hegemonized through its emergence at the intersection of sect, political loyalty, and class. At the empirical level, this paper draws on narratives recollected during fieldwork in order to show the limits of an analysis that takes identity politics as given, as seen in asylum organization's western-imbued " fixed " interpretations of what LGBT identities should " look like " and " act like. " Acknowledgments: