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Abstract
What are the political uses of homophobia in Lebanon’s sectarian system? And what does politicized homophobia in Lebanon tell us about the threat queer publicity poses to national political orders more generally? My dissertation investigates how homophobic mobilization blocks democratization and reproduces sectarian rule in the wake of the 2019 Lebanon Revolution. In existing literatures, homophobia has been primarily treated as a form of state-led violence, a kind of moral panic, and a type of reactionary social movement. These approaches figure queers as targets of criminalization, demonization, and scapegoating. While I draw on these approaches and consider queer populations as vulnerable targets of persecution, I also go beyond them by considering queer sexuality as a veritable political enemy to Lebanon’s sectarian order. In recent years, queer desire has engendered forms of social and political association that do not take sectarian kinship as their organizing principle or biological reproduction as their function. More than just challenging the demographic perpetuation of sectarian groups, I argue that the queer threat pertains to three specific qualities of queer sexuality as an axis of power and identity. First, and unlike religious, racial, and national difference, queer sexuality is not inherited through the family but emerges through covert forms of sociality that threaten the traditional family form. Second, queer culture puts forward seductive possibilities that challenge the status quo: it offers new forms of living, relating, and enjoying that compete with sectarian and heterosexual lifestyles. Finally, queers are ubiquitous: they exist in all sects, they intermix, and they form bonds that cut across sectarian groups. Consequently, the phenotypic invisibility, seductive potentials, and protean mobility of queer sexuality render it a potent solvent for sectarian boundaries and identities. Across four chapters, I show how queer sexuality threatens the cultural, territorial, legal, and geopolitical reproduction of sectarianism. I also explore the various ways in which homophobic discourse articulates the queer threat: 1) as a threat to the cultural sanctity of religious icons; 2) as a threat to the territorial dominion of religious groups; 3) as a threat to the legal foundation of the Lebanese family; and 4) as a threat to the anti-US and anti-Israel resistance in Lebanon. In each case, homophobia works politically: 1) as a mechanism of cultural censorship, 2) as a practice of territorial militancy, 3) as a mode of political alliance building, and 4) as a type of anti-imperial claim-making. I draw upon two years of on-site ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon and bring together the literature in queer theory, political science, sociology, and Middle East studies. Ultimately, and by foregrounding the Lebanese case, the dissertation showcases how homophobia operates as a tool of political, social, and cultural reproduction: homophobia not only arouses but also manages political violence; it reproduces communal difference; and it mediates inter-group relations in times of crisis.