Lil Watan: Queer patriotism in chauvinistic Lebanon

Abstract

There exists a robust literature on the impact of the sexualisation of the war on terror as an imperial endeavour on both queer and non-queer subjects in the Middle East. This article explores the consequences for LGBT activism of the localisation of the war on terror in the region and the securitisation of governance, taking Lebanon as its focus. I argue the importance of thinking through the ways in which the war on terror is localised, taken advantage of and used as a means of strengthening state power in the Global South, and the effects of such processes on activism. I explore how LGBT activists in Lebanon have engaged the war on terror as an instrument of local rather than foreign power. The weaponisation of the war on terror as an instrument of governance by the Lebanese state, I argue, has reshaped the field within which LGBT activists in the country articulate and lobby for their rights and has enabled a turn towards what I call proto-homonationalism amongst some LGBT actors in Lebanon – attempts at positioning certain segments of the LGBT population as not only of the nation but beneficial to the security state.

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