Disruptive situations: Fractal orientalism and quree strategies in Beirut

Abstract

I recently discussed Ghassan Moussawi’s work with a dear colleague. We both nodded in agreement when she remarked: ‘If I were to author a book, I would follow Moussawi’s model of writing.’ Indeed. The real tour de force in Ghassan Moussawi’s work is, scholarly contributions aside, his ability to relate in simple terms dense theoretical knots without losing sight of any of their complexities. This makes his book a must-read for academics and students who are interested in issues related to gender and sexuality in the Lebanese context, and a friendly one for the lay reader too. Moussawi, by his own admittance, uses a mix of ethnographic observations, life-history interviews, and textual analysis for the purpose of his work. I would like to add visualization as an additional method in his formulation of ‘fractal orientalism’, the building block of his work. Put simply, fractal orientalism is orientalism within orientalism, and both chapters 1 and 2 are dedicated to explaining the replication of orientalist fractals in the Lebanese context. These fractal discursions can be broken down into almost infinite (othered) spaces within already (othered) spaces: The West/Arab World, Lebanon/Arab world, Beirut/Lebanon, Christians/Muslims. Each constructs itself as more modern, and thus more LGBT friendly that the next. What’s more, within each of these fractals, further microcosms of power are created and maintained through gendered, racialized, and classed dynamics that are unlikely to find an anchoring point in linear definitions or quantitative surveys, as Moussawi rightly argues. The result is a pluralistic understanding of queerness at the theoretical and empirical levels. For example, class (read access to certain commercial spaces), and visual clues, such as the Islamic veil for women, or one’s proficiency in English all contribute to marking certain bodies as more LGBT than others, depending on the geography they inhabit. What’s more, fractal orientalism as a tool equips us with the language and architectural framework to move beyond essentialist East/West binaries, and to explore the space between and beyond them. Messiness, by now well-theorized in queer and transnational studies, is at the heart of Moussawi’s work. His interlocutors’ multiple subjectivities are laid bare in chapters 3-5 as they navigate myriad spaces (the household, the street, activism, migration) and negotiate identarian and communitarian paradigms that sit uneasily with liberalists’ universalist presumptions of what ‘LGBT’ entails. As a result, Moussawi calls for a political economy framework, rather than culturalist (generalist) accounts, when addressing queerness. For Moussawi’s queer interlocutors, visibility is concomitant with readability, and gender performance, rather than sexual orientation, is an important marker that distinguishes suspected LGBT bodies from the rest. Moussawi resists the quick fix of terming the spaces he researches as an ‘LGBT community’; if anything, it is clear to the reader that the notions of community, activism, mobilization, movement, sphere, or bubble are not interchangeable