(Dis)-Intersecting Intersectionality in the Time of Queer Syrian-Refugee-ness in Lebanon

Abstract

This paper heeds Jasbir Puar’s call to supplement an intersectional analysis with an exercise of assemblage when examining identity politics. It argues that asylum organizations’ unwillingness to account for the interplay between the receiving state (in this case Lebanon) and the lived reality of (Syrian) LGBT refugees results in a “one size fits all” narrative that forces the latter into a more visible and potentially death-instigating corporeality. The interplay between refugees and the receiving state is summed up in the elitist discourse of a “Syrian neo-invasion” that results in the revival of an “authentic Lebanese masculinity.” Whereas the Syrian refugee is vilified as “rapist” in a heterosexual context, they are emasculated as “necessarily bottom” in a same-sex one. This discourse is hegemonized through its emergence at the intersection of sect, political loyalty, and class. At the empirical level, this paper draws on narratives recollected during fieldwork in order to show the limits of an analysis that takes identity politics as given, as seen in asylum organization’s western-imbued “fixed” interpretations of what LGBT identities should “look like” and “act like.”