The Many Scenes of Queer Damascus

Abstract

This paper examines the multiple queer spaces that constitute a queer socio-spatial landscape in Damascus, from a shopping street, to a small bar, cruising parks, public baths, and the Internet. Men deliberately cross the borders that differentiate, yet connect, these spaces, from the physical environment to personal and social histories, the codes and social networks embedded within these scenes. Based on an ethnography conducted between 2010 and 2011, this paper considers how movement among these spaces produces the collective makings of differentiated queer subjectivities. I focus on movement to explore the ways in which queer bodies and subjectivities take shape as effects of the relations between these bordering spaces while men pass through and inhabit them. There is no monolithic sexuality in Damascus, but many kinds that are bordered and porous, and come together in complex ways. Movement is a form of expression and of articulating claims to certain relations that make queerness intelligible in Damascus’ urban space. This paper builds on literature in queer geography and ethnography about the social production of queer space to think about a framework of movement by which men narrate and express different forms of queer subjectivity.