Queer and Sexuality Studies are relatively newer fields of interrogation among anthropological research and theories of the Middle East and North Africa. Anthropology's unique perspective on the quotidian realities of everyday life can remove silence and provide new insights that help to break the often-disturbing ease with which anthropological "knowledge" has been taken up in efforts to make sweeping claims about the presumed "homophobia" and misogyny of "Arab culture". The panel aims to expand our understanding of sexuality and queerness in the region using a diversity of anthropological research methods. It aims to critically engage with concepts, discursive practices, and imaginings around issues of sexuality while questioning the simplistic and reductionist nature of the dominant discourses. Research on sexuality has largely focused on literary genres and representation in films and novels. While these contributions are extremely important in the imaginings of people of the region, investigating discourses, practices, and lived realities of people of the region can certainly enrich the debate and contribute conceptually and theoretically.
The Panelists will address a variety of topics ranging from trafficking and sex work, to hetereonormative Lebanon, to masculinity and sign language in Tunisia, to representations of gay Beirut in contemporary gay travelogues, to queer Palestinians' engagement with structures and processes that marginalizes them. Contextualizing and critically analyzing the global construction of human trafficking, and the inferiorizing logic that undergirds many 'interventions' and policies designed to address the issue in the Middle East, particularly in the United Arab Emirates, provides significant insight into the lived realities of sex workers for policy makers. Interrogating heteronormativity in Lebanon sheds light on the exclusionary nature of dominant concepts of family, marriage, and gender roles; and thus citizenship formations. Attention to the experiences of Palestinian Queers in Israel offers a unique opportunity, not just to correct the racist/Orientalist assumptions in stories of queer Arab "suffering," but to interrogate some of the key terms--liberalism and democracy, tolerance and tradition--around which knowledge (anthropological and otherwise) about the Middle East is organized. Examining the ways in which contemporary discourses of Euro-American travelogues on gay tourism in Beirut (2005-2010) manage unfamiliarity with regards to Beirut and non-heterosexual Lebanese men questions the means by which these travelogues invoke narratives of linear progress and modernity. This panel thus draws on ethnographic work to contribute to the discourse while bringing anthropological frameworks in conversation with other disciplines at MESA.
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Dr. Pardis Mahdavi
The past few decades have witnessed several “moral panics” with regards to human trafficking that have concentrated on the issue of commercial sex work and prostitution. Though these debates have taken place at the policy and discursive level, anthropologists have been active in drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork with those labeled as ‘trafficked’ to contrast policies with the realities of lived experience. While anthropologists have conducted research in EuroAmerica, East, South and Southeast Asia, anthropological research addressing sex work in the Middle East has been limited, despite the fact that the Middle East features prominently in both policy and discourse.
This presentation draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2010 with commercial sex workers and their clients in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, as well as a review of discourse and policy documents to highlight the contrasts between discourse and policy on the one hand, and the reality of lived experiences of sex work, migration and labor in the United Arab Emirates. Within the discourse, constructions of 'trafficked victim' and ‘victimizer’ are highly gendered, raced and sexualized. When applied to the Middle East, these conversations take a distincitively orientalist turn in casting Arab and Iranian men as villanous and vorcacious consumers of sex work (for a recent example see the Hollywood blockbuster hit Taken about a global human trafficking scheme whose main leaders are Arab men living in the Gulf), and Middle Eastern women as decidedly lacking in agency. This paper uses anthropological research to contextualize and critically analyze the global construction of human trafficking, and the inferiorizing logic that undergirds many ‘interventions’ and policies designed to address the issue in the Middle East.
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In Lebanon as elsewhere in the Arab World there have been more engaged public and private activism addressing the rights of LGBTQI communities. While alternative family structures have allowed for alternative sexualities to exist and thrive behind the scenes, these have often been mostly in the private realm and shrouded with silence. As such, heteronormativity continued to uphold societal expectations of family, adulthood, and citizenship. Today, there are efforts to provide ongoing support to young men and women struggling for acceptance and understanding of their sexual identities and beginnings of demands to provide legitimacy to alternative family structures, sexualities, and gender identities. While some scholars and activists have argued these trends are fostered by what they call the “gay international” and westernization, others have begun to unveil the ‘authentic’ nature of these movements. Activists in Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco are forming the basis of a broad base movement supportive of alternative sexualities, requesting approval and acceptance of society, and advocating for legal changes.
This paper will interrogate heteronormativity in Lebanon, looking at the exclusionary nature of dominant concepts of family, marriage, and gender roles. It will examine how dominant discourses and practices of family and marriage, exclude certain categories of people from ‘adulthood’ and ‘citizenship’. Joseph, Khater, and others have articulated the patriarchal nature of the Lebanese state and that citizenship is often mediated through family relationships and sectarian affiliations. Once excluded from these normative relationships, where does Lebanon’s queer community find support, achieve its rights, and belong. These violent exclusionary practices force people whose identities or desires lie outside the boundaries of gender and sexual normativity such as queers subjects to leave Lebanon and try to form their own families in other countries, to exist on the margin of society, or to engage in fake normative family practices.
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Rodney WJ Collins
This ethnographic research paper offers a portrait of the d/Deaf, deafness, and Tunisian Sign Language (TSL) in contemporary Tunisia. The paper explores dimensions of language, gender, and identity for members of the d/Deaf community in Tunisia who despite official policies on disability and deafness are marginalized in terms of their potential economic and social positioning and achievement. The Deaf community of Tunis receives support primarily from two associations. The first formal accord was granted in 1970 to the Association Tunisienne d’Aide aux Sourds-Muets (ATAS[M]) under the auspices of the Ministry of Social Affairs, Solidarity & Tunisians Living Abroad. Over the course of its 40 years, the ATAS has provided educational (e.g. primary, secondary, vocational) and social (e.g. medical, administrative) support services for the Deaf and hard of hearing. As a supplement to the work of the ATAS, the Association Voix du Sourd Tunisie (AVST) was informally founded by Ali Louati in the late 1970s so as to provide an ‘amicale’ for Deaf denizens of central Tunis. Louati’s commitment to enhancing spaces of sociality for the Deaf continues to inform the priorities of the AVST as does his intention to systematize TSL. To date, there has been no anthropological research conducted on socio-cultural issues of deafness in Tunisia, although there have been several studies on physical disability ranging from blindness (Beltaief 2003) to the elderly (Yount & Agree 2005) to physical disability more broadly construed (Lachheb 2009; Sellami 2002) as well as an epidemiological study on genetic deafness (Ben Arab 1990). Drawing on participation-observation research, life histories, and interviews, the paper examines the hopes, the aspirations, the risks, and the challenges facing men in the d/Deaf community in Tunisia today. While providing a view into the specificity of d/Deaf identity, the semiotics of TSL, and the status of the d/Deaf community in contemporary and historical Tunis, the paper ultimately strives to outline the actual politics of social difference in urban North Africa with a focus on configurations of contemporary male subjectivity.
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Dr. Jason Ritchie
Although anthropologists have, for the most part, been silent on questions of same-sex sexualities -- and sexuality more generally -- among Arabs, in this paper, I argue that the discipline would do well to break that silence, if not for its unique perspective on the quotidian
realities of everyday life, then because of the disturbing ease with which anthropological "knowledge" has been taken up in efforts to make sweeping claims about the presumed "homophobia" of "Arab culture," with sometimes violent consequences.
Drawing on ethnographic research, I focus on the particular experiences of queer Palestinians in Israel, a space in which they are simultaneously appealed to, as victims of the (Israeli) nation’s most threatening other (the Arab/Palestinian "terrorist"), and abjected, as themselves potential threats to the nation. Situated at the intersection of the neoliberal incorporation of (some) queers and the increasing abjection of racialized Arabs, queer Palestinians are an object of considerable ambivalence in the Israeli (and "Western") imagination. As victimized queers who deserve to live and potential terrorists who deserve to die, queer Palestinians are relegated to a borderzone between citizen and non-citizen, between belonging and not-belonging -- in short, between life and death. Although that space is structured by the violence of the Israeli state and its efforts to regulate
populations on the basis of rigidly defined categories, it also inadvertently creates possibilities for challenges to the categorical logic that undergirds it. I explore in this paper how queer Palestinians engage with structures and processes that relegate them to the margins in ways that, with all their limitations, hint at a potential for radical critique in the slippages and failures of regimes of control. I suggest, moreover, that attention to their experiences offers a unique opportunity, not just to correct the racist/Orientalist assumptions in stories of queer Arab "suffering," but to interrogate some of the key terms -- liberalism and democracy, tolerance and tradition -- around which knowledge (anthropological and otherwise)
about the Middle East is organized.
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Mr. Ghassan Moussawi
This paper examines the ways in which contemporary discourses of Euro-American travelogues on gay tourism in Beirut (2005-2010), manage unfamiliarity with regards to Beirut and non-heterosexual Lebanese men. Departing from Edward Said, I argue that even though these representations are engaged in orientalist and nativizing discourses, they do not simply rest on the dichotomization of East/West and Lebanese/Euro-American. Liminality, hybridity, and relationality, become central concepts to look at. Second, I question the means by which these travelogues invoke narratives of linear progress and modernity, whereby progress is measured in terms of the presence of “tolerant” attitudes towards homosexuality and a Western constituted “gay identity”, gay-friendly spaces and an LGBT organization. Third, I underscore the ways that these texts are actively shaping an image of the western gay tourist and the “locals.” Using an intersectional approach I present the ways in which the gay tourists and the locals are essentialized, gendered, racialized and sexualized. In my attempt to understand the different types of queer masculinities presented, I will touch upon the discourses of discovery, exploration and adventure that circulate in these travelogues that (re)present a certain notion of “gay identity” premised on, “outness,” transitional mobility physical ability and gender conformity. Finally, I will question the possibilities of using an “assemblages” framework and the limitations of intersectionality in understanding these interrelated representations of the city, tourists and locals.
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Dina Siddiqi
This paper examines the politics of representation around male to male sexualities in contemporary Bangladesh. It traces the tensions and faultlines that emerge when NGOS promote sexual rights claims in the language of individual identity, among historically and culturally located subjects for whom sexual and social identities do not necessarily coincide. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in urban Bangladesh, I argue that the meanings and use of categories such as gay, kothi and MSM are shaped by the NGOisation of activist space. Further, and contrary to dominant represenations, a range of sexual practices are accomodated as long as these do not rupture the public-private divide.
