Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut

Synopsis

Disruptive Situations challenges representations of contemporary Beirut as an exceptional space for LGBTQ people by highlighting everyday life in a city where violence is the norm. Ghassan Moussawi, a Beirut native, seeks to uncover the underlying processes of what he calls “fractal orientalism,” a relational understanding of modernity and cosmopolitanism that illustrates how transnational discourses of national and sexual exceptionalism operate on multiple scales in the Arab world. Moussawi’s intrepid ethnography features the voices of women, gay men and genderqueers in Beirut to examine how queer individuals negotiate life in this uncertain region. He examines “al-wad’,” or “the situation,” to understand the practices that form these strategies and to raise questions about queer-friendly spaces in and beyond Beirut. Disruptive Situations alsoshows how LGBTQ Beirutis resist reconciliation narratives and position their identities and visibility at different times as ways of simultaneously managing their multiple positionalities and al-wad’. Moussawi argues that the daily survival strategies in Beirut are queer—and not only enacted by LGBTQ people—since Beirutis are living amidst an already queer situation of ongoing precarity.

Copyright:

2020

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9781439918517

Related ISBNs:

9781439918494, 9781439918500

Publisher:

Temple University Press

Date of Addition:

06/22/20

Copyrighted By:

Temple University Press

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender, Social Studies, Sociology

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.