Review of Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut

Perverts or Heroes in the Post‐Socialist “Cold War”: Formula Stories of Lesbian/Bisexual/Queer Women and Transgender People in Ukrainian Media

“…Neither Western logics nor traditional imperialisms can be neatly pitted against the other for one side to win the moral high ground. Moussawi's (2020) account of fractal Orientalism in Lebanon (nested binaries of power and colonialism at many points of scale) seems more consistent with the Ukrainian situation. Everyday life during Russia's war on Ukraine and the mass migration that has followed and continues to ebb and flow can be characterized by repression and invention under conditions of great precarity and uncertainty.…”

“…It is analytically important to consider how the origins of formula stories impact local actors in terms of being able to articulate an identity that is of their own locality. Importantly, as Moussawi (2020:22) urges, we must move past the stories of heroes or victims and presumption of binary discourse to hear from the LGBTQ+ people themselves. It remains to be seen how and whether LBQ women and transgender people living in Ukraine can articulate sexual and gendered identities that are specific to their experience rather than the world of nested geopolitics—especially now in a country torn apart by Russian violence while seemingly also coming together culturally to resist Russia and maintain a sovereign Ukraine.…”

“…Importantly, Shchurko and Suchland (2022:73) expand the logic of west/east cold war or global north v. global south politics to understand the former Soviet Union as an imperial project and to view global, transnational history as having “multiple centers and peripheries.” In particular, since the end of the Soviet Union, the people of Ukraine have suffered uneven outcomes, especially through processes of migration and gender politics, from the recent 30 years of nation‐state building (Solari 2018). Moussawi's (2020) account of fractal Orientalism (nested binaries of power and colonialism at many points of scale) seems more consistent with the Ukrainian situation, which—like Lebanon—can be characterized by queer invention under conditions of great precarity and uncertainty.…”

“…The historical emergence of U.S. identities from “lesbian and gay” to “LGBT” to “queer” is of contested relevance outside of the “West.” The U.S./European timeline of queer politics has problematically been held out as an imperialist exemplar, ostensibly for other countries to follow—an example of the West exporting sexual politics to other countries in the so‐called periphery (Istodor 2022). Much post‐socialist and decolonial literature rightfully contests the usefulness of the West as the “model” of sexual politics, often re‐writing the chronology and value of Western LGBTQ+ politics outside the West (Kao 2021; Kondakov 2021; Liinason and Alm 2018; Mayerchyk and Plakhotnik 2019; Moussawi 2020; Puar 2007; Shchurko and Suchland 2022; Suchland 2018, 2021; Ye 2021).…”

Lil Watan: Queer patriotism in chauvinistic Lebanon

“…I am drawing on this example to demonstrate that the politics of respectability within some LGBT circles in Lebanon develops in particular ways in response to the localisation of the war on terror, and comes to depend not only on distinguishing certain LGBT subjects from 'non-modern' working-classes or foreigners, but on articulating the need to protect such subjects from criminality, particularly that of the terrorist or potential terrorist, drawing not only on civilisational but on security logics as well. Beyond just making the case for gays and lesbians being 'like everyone else' (Moussawi, 2020), these discourses frame them as threatened by terror in similar ways to the rest of the Lebanese citizenry and posit terror's targeting of LGBT subjects as a potential instrument of powerthe protection of LGBT subjects as a counter-terrorism tactic.…”