Queer disruptions: modernity and non-normative gender and sexualities in post-war Beirut

My dissertation addresses the changing historical meanings of sexual practices and identities, and the effects of political turmoil and conflict on the experiences of LGBTQ individuals in post-war Beirut. Drawing on ethnographic observations, life history interviews and content analysis, I rethink how claims of modernity and progress operate by focusing on queer sexualities in Beirut since the year 2005. Dominant Euro-American understandings of coming out and LGBTQ visibility are often used as indicators of non-Western societies’ modernity and progress. My work complicates this stance, illustrating how queer lives in Beirut unsettle and disrupt binaries of visibility/invisibility and tradition/progress. In addition, I show how dominant narratives of modernity view the emergence of “gay rights” in the Middle East as a marker of progress, without taking into account local exclusionary practices. I examine public discourses, personal narratives, and collective organizing strategies in a number of different contexts. Unlike much research that focuses on how sexuality emerges as the most salient marker of difference in LGBT people’s personal narratives, my research illustrates that LGBT individuals in Beirut emphasize how gender, class, and sectarian identities act as their primary modes of visible self-making. Rather than treating queer visibility as a hallmark of progress, individuals devise strategies of visibility such as creating and living in what they refer to as “imagined bubbles.” Queer Beirutis’ strategies vary across different family and social contexts and are shaped by political turmoil, regional instability, and sectarian conflict. Using a feminist intersectional lens, I highlight how various queer social circles contest, yet unwittingly reproduce, the exclusionary practices of Beirut’s cosmopolitanism that sideline gender-nonnormative and transgender persons, as well as migrant workers and refugees. Marginalized queer Beirutis, particularly working-class and gender-nonconforming individuals, question Beirut’s cosmopolitanism and carve out new understandings of queer visibilities that challenge dominant understandings of modernity and progress.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Ghassan Moussaw