Description
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.
Author: Ghassan Moussawi
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 06/22/2020
Pages: 218
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.63lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.44d
ISBN13: 9781439918500
ISBN10: 1439918503
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | LGBTQ+ Studies | Gay Studies
- Social Science | Violence in Society
- Social Science | Gender Studies
About the Author
Ghassan Moussawi is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and of Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.