(Dis)-Intersecting Intersectionality in the Time of Queer Syrian-Refugee-ness in Lebanon
Allouche, S
Date: 1 March 2019
Article
Journal
Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research
Publisher
Heinrich Böll Stiftung
Abstract
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 ...
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 westernimbued “fixed” interpretations of what LGBT identities should “look like” and “act like.”
Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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