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LGBTQ Activism in the MENA
Abstract
The last two decades have seen a flourishing of scholarship in and beyond the field of geography that examines the spatiality of social movements. Social movement theorists are increasingly incorporating spatiality into their conceptualizations of social movements and have produced research on a wide variety of activisms - environmental justice, immigrant rights, neoliberalism and globalization -- from a spatial perspective (Leitner, Sheppard, Sziartot, 2008). Scholarship on the MENA similarly has undergone a ‘spatial turn’ with scholars emphasizing issues of scale, territory, topography, flows and connectivities, and environmental materialities in their analyses of political phenomenon (Salman, El-Kazaz, Harb, forthcoming; Schwedler, 2020, forthcoming). This paper builds on this growing body of literature on the MENA. It examines LGBTQ activism in Jordan from the perspective of multiple spatialities - place, scale, networks, mobility and socio-spatial positionality – in order to better shed light on the agency of LGBTQ MENA activists and the manifold processes that shape the possibilities for activism in the region. An important finding of the paper is that of the complexities of NGO-ization and a rejection of the international-local binary in favour of the concept of ‘activism from within’ (Misgav 2015): the potential to subvert and undermine hegemony ‘from within’ the arena of international NGOs. The research for this paper is based on interviews with over 100 activists from Jordan and the MENA between 2016-2020.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Jordan
Sub Area
Queer/LGBT Studies