Strategies of passing: Hypervisible bodies, disrespectable affinities, and Syrian trans refugees in Lebanon

Abstract

In today’s Lebanon, Syrian trans refugees face intersecting systems of violence that position them as hypervisible ‘deviants’ in multiple ways: as refugees without formal legal residency, as trans individuals without congruent gender markers, and as working-class individuals. Attending ethnographically to the notions of hypervisibility and (dis)respectability that underpin such deviances, this article explores how the Lebanese security-morality apparatus enforces hypervisibility on Syrian trans women by eroding their respectability and privacy. In the context of recent crackdowns on Syrian-majority areas and LGBT spaces, I look specifically to how (dis)respectability is deployed by and against Syrian trans women in their crisscrossing of the boundaries of both a ‘trans closet’ and ideals of middle-class Lebanese (cis)womanhood. My analysis evolves the concept of respectability to account for how my interlocuters navigate the permeability of their private spaces, secure themselves against potential harm, and assert their sovereignty. This is accomplished through the use of two strategies: ‘respectable passing’—investing in markers of class and citizenship over those of gender, and ‘disrespectable affinities’—engaging in a politics of the vulgar and forging social connections between hypervisible communities, effecting alternative forms of sociality that unsettle the border between trans and cis Syrians in the racialized and classed order of contemporary Beirut.