Queer Activism in Lebanon
Mar. 22nd, 2011 11:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ajnabiehOof, it's been a hard semester so far. Chalk it up to a six-week-long illness (which I'm almost recovered from), accompanied by the momentous task of finishing the first draft of my dissertation. I feel a bit better now, I have to admit.
So I'm going to be posting more now! I hope! I plan!
In any case, I wanted to put this out there. On March 1, I participated in an amazing panel organized by Global Studies at the New School, entitled Coming Out in the Developing World: Insurgent Queer Identities in the Middle East. I'll fully admit, I was a last-minute pinch hitter; queer issues in the Middle East are less of a serious research interest for me, and more like a hobby-slash-political-interest. However, it was a tremendous pleasure to be on the panel.
I know that a recording of the event was made, but I can't seem to find it publicly available. However, I wrote up my talk beforehand, rather than improvising as is my wont, so I do have my text. I don't think I gave it exactly as written (who does?), but the main points are all there. I've tried to link to all of the websites that I used images from for my PowerPoint, but it's possible I missed something, or did it awkwardly; please comment if there's anything that doesn't make sense!
I'm tremendously grateful to have the chance to be on this panel, alongside activists who are so much more experienced and knowledgeable than I am about LGBT experiences and politics in the Middle East. My interest in queer politics in the Middle East stems largely from my position as a lesbian and a feminist who is deeply invested in liberatory politics across the globe, and as someone who wants to be a productive ally to movements for gender and sexual justice, where ever they are. What I hope to add to the conversation is a set of interesting bits of evidence, and perhaps a useful perspective from which to reflect on them.
One of the most important things that was ever said to me about queer studies--and that, let's be honest, has shaped my entire academic career--was an off-hand remark by Laurie Essig, my first queer studies professor, who is now at Middlebury College. When I approached her about my desire to write a paper on LGBT issues in the Middle East, she said to me, "Men have always had sex with men, and women have always had sex with women. It's what they called it, and what it meant socially, that has changed." So what I want to talk about today is what queer identities and practices mean socially in the space between the Arab world and the West.
My argument here is that queer identities and practices in the contemporary Middle East are shaped and transformed by collisions between American, European, and Middle Eastern queer people and organizations. It is in these spaces of tension between Arabs and non-Arabs that Arab queer identities come to be named, articulated, and specified. I want to explore this by looking at the work of progressive queer activists in Lebanon, and seeing how intertwined it is with other queer discourses with other geographic origins. Even when Arab queer politics takes a dissenting voice from American queer politics, they remain connected, with American politics the necessary interlocutor to Arab queer voices.
Before I get into the fun data, I want to take just a quick step back and talk about language. (Maybe other people find this fun, too!) The words we use to talk about queer identities come into creation at particular points in time, and reflect existing meanings. For instance, the fact that I use "queer" absolutely indicates me correctly as speaking in the 21st century, in a political and/or academic context. Similarly, words like gay, lesbian, homosexual, Sapphist, homophile, invert, and others come to us out of the history of the past two centuries of trying to name same-sex desire in English.
The language for talking about homosexuality in Arabic similarly reflects different attempts to gain control over the language. Like any good student of Arabic, I have a number of large and unwieldy dictionaries in my house, to which I turned to investigate how they translate "homosexual." My 1999 Al-Mawrid English-to-Arabic dictionary, published in Lebanon, gives the translation as luti, literally meaning "one of Lot," in reference to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. My 2005 Al-Mawrid Arabic-to-English translates luti as "homosexual, sodomite, queer, pederast, bugger, invert"; certainly a word that carries all those connotations is not a neutral term to describe a person! For lesbian, the 1999 dictionary gives sihaq, which comes from a root meaning "to crush" and is best translated into English sexual vocabulary as tribadist (which I will neglect to define more precisely out of a sense of decorum); it does not earn an entry in the 2005 Arabic-to-English. Neither of these dictionaries contain the word most commonly used for gay, lesbian, or homosexual in contemporary pro-queer activist discourse, which is mithli or mithliyya, which are derived from the basic root meaning "sameness." Interestingly, my 1993 edition Hans Wehr, widely considered the authoritative Arabic-to-English dictionary in the field, does contain an entry for al-jinsiya al-mithli, meaning homosexuality, in the section for the root meem-tha-laam, its basic root. That suggests that derivations from the root meem-tha-laam had already been coined by then, though the fact that the adjectives are not present suggestions it was not in high circulation.
(Point of extremely geeky fact: Google Translate translates mithli and mithliyya as gay and lesbian, respectively--which means that the dual digital corpuses that its algorhythm draws from has to have the terms as equivalents.)
I bring this up because I want to point out, right from the start, that the language used in pro-queer Arabic (at least in Lebanon) to describe queer people does not emerge from the old traditions of genderbending and deviant sexuality. Terms like luti and sihaq are not being reclaimed, at least not in the process of making a community. In a 2004 article about Egypt, human rights activist Scott Long writes that the older term khawal, used to describe crossdressing dancers in the 19th century, has become a term that applied to all queer men, but only as a derogatory term, and that local equivalents to 'top' and 'bottom' were in active use, but did not serve to describe a queer community. Apart from that, the English word "gay" was used routinely by men of different class and educational statuses. In the Lebanese context, as well, we see a conscious creation of an Arabic term that refers to homosexuality in terms much like those we use in English. Here we have a nice, proper fusha Arabic word, but one whose creation derives, at least in part, from experience with other terms for talking about queer identities.
So, let me turn next to the Lebanese example. Lebanon has at least two major LGBT organizations, Helem and Meem. Meem is a social and support network for lesbians, bisexual, queer, and questioning women, and transgender persons, which meets regularly in Beirut. On their website, they describe themselves as " a group of really cool women who look out for each other and work on making Lebanon a better home for queer and transgender persons." Members join through a screening process to make sure that they can adhere to the group's safe space principles and are really interested in joining; they list some basic principles on their website, which include such important points as not outing anyone, that Meem is not "a lesbian zoo" or "a dating service," and that Meem does not tolerate "lesbian drama." (I assume I'm not the only person who now desperately wants to join.) Meem publishes a weekly e-magazine, Bekhsoos, which I really recommend it to anyone who is interested in queer politics in the Middle East, as the writing is engaging and quite accessible.
The second organization I'll be talking about is Helem, which is a more comprehensive LGBT lobbying and support organization. Helem runs a community center in Beirut, open six days a week, with a library, support groups, and social activities. In addition, they have three major areas of focus: health support, including HIV/AIDS and other sexual health issues for men who have sex with men, awareness, by which they mean the production of information in Arabic about homosexuality and homophobia, and advocacy, particularly lobbying against law 534 of the Lebanese penal code, which says that "unnatural sexual intercourse" can be punished with a year in prison. Helem frames itself as an "open and public" organization, by which they mean that they are public about their work, in a way that courts publicity. While Meem is a group that maintains a closed and private space for women to talk about their issues, Helem takes politics front and center, and focuses on visibility. However, very few individuals are named in their documents--Nizar Saghiyeh, for instance, is one of the very few. While the organization may be public, names are not generally named. (To compare, Meem and Bekhsoos list the names of those writing for them, and those who hold positions in the organization, but only their first names, and in some cases just nicknames or internet handles.)
Meem/Bekhsoos and Helem are both small organizations--a 2008 report on Helem mentions 40 members and a thousand "supporters," while Meem's website lists a full membership of 250--but they nevertheless make as big a splash as they can, and are some of the most visible instances of queer culture in the Middle East online.
I want to start by talking about the way that pop culture moves transnationally. This shouldn't be surprising in this age of globalization that this is true, but the ways in which it works are, I think, illuminating. Let's start with a very simple example. Bekhsoos runs a feature called Bayneh w Baynik, which I think translates reasonably well as "between you and me," and which is modeled on Post Secret. This image is from a post from January 10th. (Link to website; top image, which features the cover of the Rihanna single Only Girl in the World with superimposed text reading "I'll make you feel like you're the only girl in the world if you skip the part about making me feel like a man.") What I love about this is that it clearly includes an affection for the song--which was an international hit--but also a desire to transform it. Alongside other Bayneh w Baynik posts, such as this one (second image down), which includes the text "Femininity is natural...ha ha, fuck you," this plays interestingly with gender roles, and with queer identity in mainstream culture.
The second one is a post about Lady Gaga's new single, Born This Way. The writer was excited about the song for two reasons: first, that it seemed to be a pro-queer anthem, and, second, the follow lines: "You're black, white, beige, chola descent/You're Lebanese, you're orient."
In the comments, there are a variety of responses. I want to highlight two. First, a commenter named Saida posts "She is obviously benefitting (financially) from being pro-gay rights. But I suppose people are going to argue that at least she is doing something. I’d like to add that the argument that we’re born this way gives me the shivers.. Despite the fact that this treats being queer as a malfunction. The point is it shouldn’t matter, whether we’re born this way or whether I get up tomorrow and decide I want to fuck a girl and/or a dude, possibly be a dude; whatever.. It’s nobody’s business. So instead of aiming for sympathy, strive for sincere acceptance." Later in the thread, Zoe says, "HOWEVER, this song is a huge risk for her, it’s one thing to have an opinion,but to go around and release a whole album discussing sexuality and gay equality, it’s an on another level.I admire her for that. She’s a mainstream artist with huge influence, Kudos for her for using her fame for a good cause."
What I want to point out is that these strike me as very similar to the responses I've seen in my circles to the song: criticisms of the "born-this-way" discourse, objections to the use of the words "chola" and "orient" (which I was surprised not to find here), and, in the end, appreciation for a major artist using her platform in support of queer issues, even if in problematic ways. Not only are pop culture references traveling across the world, but the same sorts of criticisms are made of them in different places.
This is the second point I want to bring us to: that criticisms of politics take on recognizable shapes in the Lebanese context. Let's start with this post from Bekhsoos called "On the Hypocrisy of Gay Activism." The post is long and fantastic, and I recommend you read it, but the gist of it is this: a bunch of people in the Beirut LGBT scene were angry because several gay men were denied entrance to a bar, and a boycott was being organized. But the writer points out that there are lots of times when transgender people are denied access to gay bars, and that the same people who argue for boycotting this bar say we need to be understanding of the people who keep transpeople out of their bars. It also talks about classism and other forms of discrimination in the Beirut bar scene. It ends with this sentence: "I have always been a proponent of boycott as an effective means of addressing discrimination, and I will not go to Kayan until it is clear to me that these sorts of practices stop, as I do not go to other places that have similar policies. I also hope that the awareness among those who are leading the Kayan campaign expands to include those more marginalized than middle-class gay men."
For me, this post is deeply reminiscent of all the time I've spent in intersectional feminist and queer activism. The stakes here are much as they are in queer communities in New York and elsewhere: to argue that discrimination against one needs to be taken as seriously as discrimination against another, and that there are broad principles that should unite us as a queer community, rather than subdividing us along axes and greater and lesser privilege.
But just because things are familiar does not mean that they are the same. Let's take a look at Helem's statement for IDAHO, the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia 2010. Their theme was "Ana Shaz/I'm Queer," and what being "queer" means--being an outsider, someone who deviates from mainstream norms and tries to alter them. The statement concludes with a list of demands, which start with the decriminalization of "deviant sexual acts" and support for LGBTQI people in educational institutions. However, it continues to demand an increase in legal rights for women, the legalization of sex work, changes to personal status law--a major issue in multi-confessional Lebanon--improvements in status for foreign workers, and other progressive changes for those who are marginalized by mainstream society--for those who are also queer, if not in sexuality, then in perceived deviance.
Now, I think this is a great statement. But what also strikes me about it is how incredibly difficult it would be to get a mainstream LGBT organization in the United States to write this statement. Consider how quickly transgender rights are sacrificed in the name of rights for lesbians and gays, or the deeply normalizing impulse behind the fight for same-sex marriage. Helem's statement here places them on the radical edge of queer politics, not just for Lebanon, but transnationally.
Here is an announcement of a project that Helem, Meem, and Nasawiya, a Beiruti feminist group, worked on as part of a campaign for sexual and bodily rights. (The videos that came out of this project are amazing, and can be viewed here; I really recommend them.) However, what I want to point out is that a mainstream, male-dominated LGBT organization willingly joined in coalition with a lesbian group and several feminist groups in a project that drew common cause between women's right to control their bodies and queer people's right to free sexuality. Again, this is not a project that I think it would be easy to get a mainstream, male-dominated queer rights organization on board with in the US; while I know plenty of politically active queer men who make strong connections between women's rights and LGBT rights, it's the organizational element that is hard to manage.
So far, all I've done is talk about common discourses and ideas between Lebanese progressive queer politics and those in the US; that is, so far we've seen that Arab queer politics are not necessarily entirely different from those elsewhere. But I want to make a broader point, which is that the work being done in Helem and Meem also constitutes an answering-back, and an active criticism, of Western queer politics. It is impossible to be a queer activist in the Arab world without knowing about what happens in the US and elsewhere, but from that knowledge doesn't emerge mimicry. Arab queer movements are not copies of American movements, but are trying to engage in a dialogue with them. The question that I want to put here, in all of our minds, is whether this dialogue is inevitably one-sided, and whether we are in a position to hear what is being said.
This is a speech that a member of Helem gave to a group of international LGBT tourism professionals. Lebanon is a significant tourist destination, at least when it is not beseiged by war, and is also known as a gay tourist destination, particularly for men. This speech includes two different critiques of the notion of Lebanon as gay paradise for tourists. First is the argument that all is far from well for LGBT people in Lebanon, and that the "gay haven" aspect of Lebanon is only for rich foreigners, not for the average Lebanese. The second is a criticism of the tourism industry for prior participation in a IGLTA-sponsored trip to Tel Aviv, arguing that the narrative of Israel as "the only safe haven for gays in the Middle East" helps lead to a "pinkwashing" campaign that legitimates Israel's violence against Palestinians, both within and outside its borders. Helem has issued statements on several occasions calling for the boycotting of Israel within different LGBT organizations, particularly within the tourism industry--and as you can see from this statement, even participating in the LebTours even to give this critical statement was controversial.
These next two slides are cartoons that Bekhsoos published on the day after Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed in the United States. (Here; the first features a bunch of dancing figures, and the text "We would like to congratulate the American LGBT movement on their important victory which now allows queers to come out and have gay pride when invading countries and killing tens of thousands of people, preferably Arabs and Muslims. Sincerely, the Queer Arab Women You Think Need Saving." The second (which is third on the original page) is a dialogue between two American soldiers, where one responds to the being told he can't beat up gay soldiers anymore by asking "Can we still beat up Iraqi fags?" His interlocutor says "Totally," and he responds, "Cool.") They were not published as part of a regular issue, but appeared suddenly, out of schedule. What I want to point out is that, while I know lots of anti-militarist queer activists in the US who shared this general critique of DADT activism, I also saw a great deal of restrained approval among American activists--that, well, it's not like the military is actually a great force for good, but the repeal is better than the non-repeal. But it was from Bekhsoos, a group of women who live a quarter of the way across the world from us, that this argument got most strongly articulated.
I also want to point out that the current front page of Bekhsoos's website [as of 3/1] is this post about an ongoing controversy here in New York City--the decision of the LGBT Center not to allow an event to be held there as a part of Israeli Apartheid Week. This happens to strike all of my intellectual interests at once, as I've been studying the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement for my dissertation. Again, not just did I hear about the controversy from my Arab activist friends in the US; I heard about it again from activists in the Middle East, who are deeply aware of what happens here.
It's not just Western queer politics that are inspiring to the activists. On both February 14 and February 20th, Bekhsoos ran articles around the theme of revolution, celebrating the upheaval happening throughout the Arab world (here and here). The revolutionary spirit was alive and enthusiastic in this period, and the activists of Meem wanted to talk about what sorts of revolutions they could bring about in their own lives; they wrote about the revolutionary potential of their choices and their relationships. Rather than being anxious about what these revolutions might bring, or what the consequences would be, they embraced the changes with an optimistic spirit.
And this is where I want to conclude. Arab queer voices are tangled up in discourses that emerge from the Western centers of queer activism. They speak, in compliment to our voices, and in critique of them. There are commonalities and differences that I think can matter to us all as we talk about what a liberatory sexual politics should be. But here is my question: are we, who are active in American and other movements for queer rights, ready to take up the other half of this equation? Can we be partners to our allies in the Middle East, even if they are speaking a painful truth out our position in the world system? What movements do we need to make to take into account these gaps? The challenge I want to lay down here, for us, is to figure out how to be better allies, how to engage in transnational solidarity that does not consist of shutting down difference. It's not that our brothers and sisters need saving; it's that they need support.
So I'm going to be posting more now! I hope! I plan!
In any case, I wanted to put this out there. On March 1, I participated in an amazing panel organized by Global Studies at the New School, entitled Coming Out in the Developing World: Insurgent Queer Identities in the Middle East. I'll fully admit, I was a last-minute pinch hitter; queer issues in the Middle East are less of a serious research interest for me, and more like a hobby-slash-political-interest. However, it was a tremendous pleasure to be on the panel.
I know that a recording of the event was made, but I can't seem to find it publicly available. However, I wrote up my talk beforehand, rather than improvising as is my wont, so I do have my text. I don't think I gave it exactly as written (who does?), but the main points are all there. I've tried to link to all of the websites that I used images from for my PowerPoint, but it's possible I missed something, or did it awkwardly; please comment if there's anything that doesn't make sense!
I'm tremendously grateful to have the chance to be on this panel, alongside activists who are so much more experienced and knowledgeable than I am about LGBT experiences and politics in the Middle East. My interest in queer politics in the Middle East stems largely from my position as a lesbian and a feminist who is deeply invested in liberatory politics across the globe, and as someone who wants to be a productive ally to movements for gender and sexual justice, where ever they are. What I hope to add to the conversation is a set of interesting bits of evidence, and perhaps a useful perspective from which to reflect on them.
One of the most important things that was ever said to me about queer studies--and that, let's be honest, has shaped my entire academic career--was an off-hand remark by Laurie Essig, my first queer studies professor, who is now at Middlebury College. When I approached her about my desire to write a paper on LGBT issues in the Middle East, she said to me, "Men have always had sex with men, and women have always had sex with women. It's what they called it, and what it meant socially, that has changed." So what I want to talk about today is what queer identities and practices mean socially in the space between the Arab world and the West.
My argument here is that queer identities and practices in the contemporary Middle East are shaped and transformed by collisions between American, European, and Middle Eastern queer people and organizations. It is in these spaces of tension between Arabs and non-Arabs that Arab queer identities come to be named, articulated, and specified. I want to explore this by looking at the work of progressive queer activists in Lebanon, and seeing how intertwined it is with other queer discourses with other geographic origins. Even when Arab queer politics takes a dissenting voice from American queer politics, they remain connected, with American politics the necessary interlocutor to Arab queer voices.
Before I get into the fun data, I want to take just a quick step back and talk about language. (Maybe other people find this fun, too!) The words we use to talk about queer identities come into creation at particular points in time, and reflect existing meanings. For instance, the fact that I use "queer" absolutely indicates me correctly as speaking in the 21st century, in a political and/or academic context. Similarly, words like gay, lesbian, homosexual, Sapphist, homophile, invert, and others come to us out of the history of the past two centuries of trying to name same-sex desire in English.
The language for talking about homosexuality in Arabic similarly reflects different attempts to gain control over the language. Like any good student of Arabic, I have a number of large and unwieldy dictionaries in my house, to which I turned to investigate how they translate "homosexual." My 1999 Al-Mawrid English-to-Arabic dictionary, published in Lebanon, gives the translation as luti, literally meaning "one of Lot," in reference to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. My 2005 Al-Mawrid Arabic-to-English translates luti as "homosexual, sodomite, queer, pederast, bugger, invert"; certainly a word that carries all those connotations is not a neutral term to describe a person! For lesbian, the 1999 dictionary gives sihaq, which comes from a root meaning "to crush" and is best translated into English sexual vocabulary as tribadist (which I will neglect to define more precisely out of a sense of decorum); it does not earn an entry in the 2005 Arabic-to-English. Neither of these dictionaries contain the word most commonly used for gay, lesbian, or homosexual in contemporary pro-queer activist discourse, which is mithli or mithliyya, which are derived from the basic root meaning "sameness." Interestingly, my 1993 edition Hans Wehr, widely considered the authoritative Arabic-to-English dictionary in the field, does contain an entry for al-jinsiya al-mithli, meaning homosexuality, in the section for the root meem-tha-laam, its basic root. That suggests that derivations from the root meem-tha-laam had already been coined by then, though the fact that the adjectives are not present suggestions it was not in high circulation.
(Point of extremely geeky fact: Google Translate translates mithli and mithliyya as gay and lesbian, respectively--which means that the dual digital corpuses that its algorhythm draws from has to have the terms as equivalents.)
I bring this up because I want to point out, right from the start, that the language used in pro-queer Arabic (at least in Lebanon) to describe queer people does not emerge from the old traditions of genderbending and deviant sexuality. Terms like luti and sihaq are not being reclaimed, at least not in the process of making a community. In a 2004 article about Egypt, human rights activist Scott Long writes that the older term khawal, used to describe crossdressing dancers in the 19th century, has become a term that applied to all queer men, but only as a derogatory term, and that local equivalents to 'top' and 'bottom' were in active use, but did not serve to describe a queer community. Apart from that, the English word "gay" was used routinely by men of different class and educational statuses. In the Lebanese context, as well, we see a conscious creation of an Arabic term that refers to homosexuality in terms much like those we use in English. Here we have a nice, proper fusha Arabic word, but one whose creation derives, at least in part, from experience with other terms for talking about queer identities.
So, let me turn next to the Lebanese example. Lebanon has at least two major LGBT organizations, Helem and Meem. Meem is a social and support network for lesbians, bisexual, queer, and questioning women, and transgender persons, which meets regularly in Beirut. On their website, they describe themselves as " a group of really cool women who look out for each other and work on making Lebanon a better home for queer and transgender persons." Members join through a screening process to make sure that they can adhere to the group's safe space principles and are really interested in joining; they list some basic principles on their website, which include such important points as not outing anyone, that Meem is not "a lesbian zoo" or "a dating service," and that Meem does not tolerate "lesbian drama." (I assume I'm not the only person who now desperately wants to join.) Meem publishes a weekly e-magazine, Bekhsoos, which I really recommend it to anyone who is interested in queer politics in the Middle East, as the writing is engaging and quite accessible.
The second organization I'll be talking about is Helem, which is a more comprehensive LGBT lobbying and support organization. Helem runs a community center in Beirut, open six days a week, with a library, support groups, and social activities. In addition, they have three major areas of focus: health support, including HIV/AIDS and other sexual health issues for men who have sex with men, awareness, by which they mean the production of information in Arabic about homosexuality and homophobia, and advocacy, particularly lobbying against law 534 of the Lebanese penal code, which says that "unnatural sexual intercourse" can be punished with a year in prison. Helem frames itself as an "open and public" organization, by which they mean that they are public about their work, in a way that courts publicity. While Meem is a group that maintains a closed and private space for women to talk about their issues, Helem takes politics front and center, and focuses on visibility. However, very few individuals are named in their documents--Nizar Saghiyeh, for instance, is one of the very few. While the organization may be public, names are not generally named. (To compare, Meem and Bekhsoos list the names of those writing for them, and those who hold positions in the organization, but only their first names, and in some cases just nicknames or internet handles.)
Meem/Bekhsoos and Helem are both small organizations--a 2008 report on Helem mentions 40 members and a thousand "supporters," while Meem's website lists a full membership of 250--but they nevertheless make as big a splash as they can, and are some of the most visible instances of queer culture in the Middle East online.
I want to start by talking about the way that pop culture moves transnationally. This shouldn't be surprising in this age of globalization that this is true, but the ways in which it works are, I think, illuminating. Let's start with a very simple example. Bekhsoos runs a feature called Bayneh w Baynik, which I think translates reasonably well as "between you and me," and which is modeled on Post Secret. This image is from a post from January 10th. (Link to website; top image, which features the cover of the Rihanna single Only Girl in the World with superimposed text reading "I'll make you feel like you're the only girl in the world if you skip the part about making me feel like a man.") What I love about this is that it clearly includes an affection for the song--which was an international hit--but also a desire to transform it. Alongside other Bayneh w Baynik posts, such as this one (second image down), which includes the text "Femininity is natural...ha ha, fuck you," this plays interestingly with gender roles, and with queer identity in mainstream culture.
The second one is a post about Lady Gaga's new single, Born This Way. The writer was excited about the song for two reasons: first, that it seemed to be a pro-queer anthem, and, second, the follow lines: "You're black, white, beige, chola descent/You're Lebanese, you're orient."
In the comments, there are a variety of responses. I want to highlight two. First, a commenter named Saida posts "She is obviously benefitting (financially) from being pro-gay rights. But I suppose people are going to argue that at least she is doing something. I’d like to add that the argument that we’re born this way gives me the shivers.. Despite the fact that this treats being queer as a malfunction. The point is it shouldn’t matter, whether we’re born this way or whether I get up tomorrow and decide I want to fuck a girl and/or a dude, possibly be a dude; whatever.. It’s nobody’s business. So instead of aiming for sympathy, strive for sincere acceptance." Later in the thread, Zoe says, "HOWEVER, this song is a huge risk for her, it’s one thing to have an opinion,but to go around and release a whole album discussing sexuality and gay equality, it’s an on another level.I admire her for that. She’s a mainstream artist with huge influence, Kudos for her for using her fame for a good cause."
What I want to point out is that these strike me as very similar to the responses I've seen in my circles to the song: criticisms of the "born-this-way" discourse, objections to the use of the words "chola" and "orient" (which I was surprised not to find here), and, in the end, appreciation for a major artist using her platform in support of queer issues, even if in problematic ways. Not only are pop culture references traveling across the world, but the same sorts of criticisms are made of them in different places.
This is the second point I want to bring us to: that criticisms of politics take on recognizable shapes in the Lebanese context. Let's start with this post from Bekhsoos called "On the Hypocrisy of Gay Activism." The post is long and fantastic, and I recommend you read it, but the gist of it is this: a bunch of people in the Beirut LGBT scene were angry because several gay men were denied entrance to a bar, and a boycott was being organized. But the writer points out that there are lots of times when transgender people are denied access to gay bars, and that the same people who argue for boycotting this bar say we need to be understanding of the people who keep transpeople out of their bars. It also talks about classism and other forms of discrimination in the Beirut bar scene. It ends with this sentence: "I have always been a proponent of boycott as an effective means of addressing discrimination, and I will not go to Kayan until it is clear to me that these sorts of practices stop, as I do not go to other places that have similar policies. I also hope that the awareness among those who are leading the Kayan campaign expands to include those more marginalized than middle-class gay men."
For me, this post is deeply reminiscent of all the time I've spent in intersectional feminist and queer activism. The stakes here are much as they are in queer communities in New York and elsewhere: to argue that discrimination against one needs to be taken as seriously as discrimination against another, and that there are broad principles that should unite us as a queer community, rather than subdividing us along axes and greater and lesser privilege.
But just because things are familiar does not mean that they are the same. Let's take a look at Helem's statement for IDAHO, the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia 2010. Their theme was "Ana Shaz/I'm Queer," and what being "queer" means--being an outsider, someone who deviates from mainstream norms and tries to alter them. The statement concludes with a list of demands, which start with the decriminalization of "deviant sexual acts" and support for LGBTQI people in educational institutions. However, it continues to demand an increase in legal rights for women, the legalization of sex work, changes to personal status law--a major issue in multi-confessional Lebanon--improvements in status for foreign workers, and other progressive changes for those who are marginalized by mainstream society--for those who are also queer, if not in sexuality, then in perceived deviance.
Now, I think this is a great statement. But what also strikes me about it is how incredibly difficult it would be to get a mainstream LGBT organization in the United States to write this statement. Consider how quickly transgender rights are sacrificed in the name of rights for lesbians and gays, or the deeply normalizing impulse behind the fight for same-sex marriage. Helem's statement here places them on the radical edge of queer politics, not just for Lebanon, but transnationally.
Here is an announcement of a project that Helem, Meem, and Nasawiya, a Beiruti feminist group, worked on as part of a campaign for sexual and bodily rights. (The videos that came out of this project are amazing, and can be viewed here; I really recommend them.) However, what I want to point out is that a mainstream, male-dominated LGBT organization willingly joined in coalition with a lesbian group and several feminist groups in a project that drew common cause between women's right to control their bodies and queer people's right to free sexuality. Again, this is not a project that I think it would be easy to get a mainstream, male-dominated queer rights organization on board with in the US; while I know plenty of politically active queer men who make strong connections between women's rights and LGBT rights, it's the organizational element that is hard to manage.
So far, all I've done is talk about common discourses and ideas between Lebanese progressive queer politics and those in the US; that is, so far we've seen that Arab queer politics are not necessarily entirely different from those elsewhere. But I want to make a broader point, which is that the work being done in Helem and Meem also constitutes an answering-back, and an active criticism, of Western queer politics. It is impossible to be a queer activist in the Arab world without knowing about what happens in the US and elsewhere, but from that knowledge doesn't emerge mimicry. Arab queer movements are not copies of American movements, but are trying to engage in a dialogue with them. The question that I want to put here, in all of our minds, is whether this dialogue is inevitably one-sided, and whether we are in a position to hear what is being said.
This is a speech that a member of Helem gave to a group of international LGBT tourism professionals. Lebanon is a significant tourist destination, at least when it is not beseiged by war, and is also known as a gay tourist destination, particularly for men. This speech includes two different critiques of the notion of Lebanon as gay paradise for tourists. First is the argument that all is far from well for LGBT people in Lebanon, and that the "gay haven" aspect of Lebanon is only for rich foreigners, not for the average Lebanese. The second is a criticism of the tourism industry for prior participation in a IGLTA-sponsored trip to Tel Aviv, arguing that the narrative of Israel as "the only safe haven for gays in the Middle East" helps lead to a "pinkwashing" campaign that legitimates Israel's violence against Palestinians, both within and outside its borders. Helem has issued statements on several occasions calling for the boycotting of Israel within different LGBT organizations, particularly within the tourism industry--and as you can see from this statement, even participating in the LebTours even to give this critical statement was controversial.
These next two slides are cartoons that Bekhsoos published on the day after Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed in the United States. (Here; the first features a bunch of dancing figures, and the text "We would like to congratulate the American LGBT movement on their important victory which now allows queers to come out and have gay pride when invading countries and killing tens of thousands of people, preferably Arabs and Muslims. Sincerely, the Queer Arab Women You Think Need Saving." The second (which is third on the original page) is a dialogue between two American soldiers, where one responds to the being told he can't beat up gay soldiers anymore by asking "Can we still beat up Iraqi fags?" His interlocutor says "Totally," and he responds, "Cool.") They were not published as part of a regular issue, but appeared suddenly, out of schedule. What I want to point out is that, while I know lots of anti-militarist queer activists in the US who shared this general critique of DADT activism, I also saw a great deal of restrained approval among American activists--that, well, it's not like the military is actually a great force for good, but the repeal is better than the non-repeal. But it was from Bekhsoos, a group of women who live a quarter of the way across the world from us, that this argument got most strongly articulated.
I also want to point out that the current front page of Bekhsoos's website [as of 3/1] is this post about an ongoing controversy here in New York City--the decision of the LGBT Center not to allow an event to be held there as a part of Israeli Apartheid Week. This happens to strike all of my intellectual interests at once, as I've been studying the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement for my dissertation. Again, not just did I hear about the controversy from my Arab activist friends in the US; I heard about it again from activists in the Middle East, who are deeply aware of what happens here.
It's not just Western queer politics that are inspiring to the activists. On both February 14 and February 20th, Bekhsoos ran articles around the theme of revolution, celebrating the upheaval happening throughout the Arab world (here and here). The revolutionary spirit was alive and enthusiastic in this period, and the activists of Meem wanted to talk about what sorts of revolutions they could bring about in their own lives; they wrote about the revolutionary potential of their choices and their relationships. Rather than being anxious about what these revolutions might bring, or what the consequences would be, they embraced the changes with an optimistic spirit.
And this is where I want to conclude. Arab queer voices are tangled up in discourses that emerge from the Western centers of queer activism. They speak, in compliment to our voices, and in critique of them. There are commonalities and differences that I think can matter to us all as we talk about what a liberatory sexual politics should be. But here is my question: are we, who are active in American and other movements for queer rights, ready to take up the other half of this equation? Can we be partners to our allies in the Middle East, even if they are speaking a painful truth out our position in the world system? What movements do we need to make to take into account these gaps? The challenge I want to lay down here, for us, is to figure out how to be better allies, how to engage in transnational solidarity that does not consist of shutting down difference. It's not that our brothers and sisters need saving; it's that they need support.