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THINKING PAST PRIDE: QUEER ARAB SHAME IN BAREED MISTA3JIL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2013

Dina Georgis
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Abstract

This article offers a reading of the groundbreaking book Bareed Mista3jil: True Stories, a collection of the narratives of Lebanese queers. Here, I argue, a burgeoning collective queer experience is being mapped from the conditions of Western imperialism and globalization, from the legacies of a colonial past, and from everyday life in postwar Lebanon. Resisting the urge to reduce Arab queer identities as either Western or traditionally Arab, the article suggests that though Western constructions of sexualities have certainly been influential, these identities are also responding to the local and cultural context. If we attune our readings to the affects that underlie the stories in this collection, it becomes clear that the emotional strategies to survive and negotiate the difficulties of postcoloniality are different from the strategies of post-Stonewall pride culture. Rather than stifle shame with the insistence of queer pride, this community is creating itself by expressing its suffering from the effects of shame and social humiliation. The narrative thread that comes through is not pride but hope. That is because shame, as Elspeth Probyn contends, gives access to what is most important and, as Eve Sedgwick has argued, is a resource for imagining change.

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Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 45 , Special Issue 2: Queer Affects , May 2013 , pp. 233 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

NOTES

1 Meem, , ed., Bareed Mista3jil: True Stories (Beirut: Meem, 2009)Google Scholar. My pairing of “Arab” and “queer” here is intentional because most of the authors of Bareed identify themselves as queer (and feminist). Additionally, since Bareed is a collection of the stories of not only women but also a few transsexual men, “queer” as an anti-identity stance is capacious and inclusive because, by definition, it is always becoming and changing. See Butler, Judith, “Critically Queer,” in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar, which argues that the meaning of queer must never be settled.

2 Meem was created when a few members of Helem, an established LGBT group in Beirut, decided that they needed a separate group for women and trans people. “Meem” is the Arabic name of the first letter of all the words in majmūʿat muʾāzara li-l-marʾa al-mithliyya (support group for homosexual women).

3 Meem, Bareed, 1.

4 Tania Tabar, “Bareed Mista3jil (Express Mail)—New book presents stories from Lebanon's lesbian and transgender community,” Menassat (2 June 2009), http://www.menassat.com/?q=en/news-articles/6591-bareed-mista3jil-express-mail-new-book-presents-stories-lebanons-lesbian-and-tran.

5 See Dropkin, Nadia, “Bareed Mista3jil,” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 9 (2011): 111–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Probyn, Elspeth, Blush: Faces of Shame (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)Google Scholar, x.

7 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).Google Scholar

8 Massad, Joseph, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Massad is not the only one to make this point; see Habib, Samar, Islam and Homosexuality (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2009)Google Scholar; Whitaker, Brian, Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East (London: Saqi Books, 2006)Google Scholar; and Murray, Stephen O. and Roscoe, Will, Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. But Massad raises important political questions by arguing that transnational queer organizations insist on rescuing Arabs from their “backward” premodern sexuality. His argument is therefore also concerned with the geopolitical implications of the legacies of Orientalist and racist writing on how Arabs are constructed and instrumentalized. This is a very important consideration with respect to Arabs such as the authors of Bareed, who are negotiating their sexual subjectivities under these conditions.

10 Massad, Desiring Arabs, 197. See also Joseph, Suad, ed., Intimate Selving in Arab Families: Gender, Self, Identity (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Accad, Evelyne, Veil of Shame: The Role of Women in the Modern Fiction of North Africa and the Arab World (Sherbrooke, Quebec: Editions Naaman, 1978)Google Scholar; Gilligan, James, “Shame, Guilt and Violence,” Social Research 70 (2003): 1149–80Google Scholar; and Ginat, Joseph, Blood Revenge: Family, Honor, Mediation and Outcasting, 2nd ed. (Portland, Ore.: Sussex Academic Press, 1997)Google Scholar for similar accounts on how repression and shaming are activated in the Arab world. What provokes reaction is not the act of sexual unfaithfulness or sexual illicit behavior but rather the act becoming public knowledge such that it brings shame to the family or community.

11 Arguably, the biopolitics and technologies of control and of “sexual freedom,” which characterize the Western sexual modernities identified by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), also underwent a process from nondiscursive expression of sexuality to the proliferation of discourse on sexuality. The difference, of course, is that these technologies are being exported and violently imposed on the global South.

12 See the debate between Massad and Ghassan Makarem, the founder of Helem, who argues against Massad on political grounds: http://www.resetdoc.org/story/1542 (accessed 1 December 2012). According to Makarem, Massad's epistemology of Arab sexuality not only stands in judgment of people who identify as homosexual or gay but also covers over actual and legal violence toward groups such as Helem (and Meem).

13 See also McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar; Kandiyoti, Deniz, Gendering the Middle East: Emerging Perspectives (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Hayes, Jarrod, Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Stoler, Ann Laura, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Thompson, Elizabeth, “Public and Private in Middle Eastern Women's History,” Journal of Women's History 15 (2003): 52–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Puar, Jasbir K., Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Awwad, Julian, “The Postcolonial Predicament of Gay Rights in the Queen Boat Affair,” Communication and Critical/[EPS]Cultural Studies 7 (2010): 320.Google Scholar

16 Kandiyoti, Gendering the Middle East; Grewal, Iderpal and Kaplan, Caren, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis, Minn.: Minnesota University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; McClintock, Imperial Leather; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power; Gopinath, Guyatri, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Awwad, “Queen Boat,” 321.

18 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).Google Scholar

19 In the case of Lebanon, constructions of sexuality and gender were negotiated in complex ways over the course of French colonial rule and became central to forging class identifications and sectarian differences. See Hanssen, Jens, “Sexuality, Health and Colonialism in Postwar 1860 Beirut,” in Sexuality in the Arab World, ed. Khalaf, Samir and Gagnon, John (London, San Francisco, Beirut: Saqi, 2006), 63–84.Google Scholar Though Hanssen does not use the language of sexual shaming, his research makes clear the impact of colonial sexual anxieties on Lebanese cultural psychic life.

20 See Habib, Samar, Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: Histories and Representations (New York and London: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar; and Shannahan, Dervla, “Some Queer Questions from a Muslim Faith Perspective,” Sexualities 13 (2010): 671–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Awwad, “Queen Boat,” 319.

22 Amer, Sahar, “Joseph Massad and the Alleged Violence of Human Rights,” Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16 (2010): 652.Google Scholar

23 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

24 See Walcott, Rinaldo, “Pedagogy and Trauma: The Middle Passage, Slavery, and the Problem of Creolization,” in Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma, ed. Simon, Roger, Rosenberg, Sharon, and Eppert, Claudia (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 135–51Google Scholar; Braziel, Jana Evans and Mannur, Anita, eds., Theorizing Diaspora (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003)Google Scholar; and Hochberg, Gil. In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).Google Scholar

25 Walcott, “Pedagogy and Trauma,” 147.

26 Ibid., 137.

27 Massad, Desiring Arabs, 49.

28 Meem, Bareed, 2.

29 Ibid., 7.

30 The key text in psychoanalysis that makes the relationship between trauma and narrative is Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press, 1996).

31 Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot (New York: Vintage Books, 1984).Google Scholar

32 Gordon, Avery, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 5.Google Scholar

33 I am making allusions here to Sedgwick, Eve, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar, where she argues that definitions of homosexuality and its incoherences have produced and structured the closet.

34 Foucault, The History of Sexuality.

35 Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling.

36 Probyn, Blush, 101.

37 Duggan, Lisa, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neo-Liberalism,” in Materializing Democracy, ed. Castronovo, R. and Nelson, D. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 173–94.Google Scholar

38 Arguably, Western queer history, and its devotion to pride, shares a history with black pride and women's pride.

39 See also Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; Haritaworn, Jin, “Loyal Repetitions of the Nation: Gay Assimilation and the ‘War on Terror,’” Dark Matter 3 (2008)Google Scholar, Special Issue on Postcolonial Sexuality, http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/ (accessed 22 June 2012); Edelman, Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Martin Manalanasan, “In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics and Diasporic Dilemma,” in Braziel and Mannur, Theorizing Diaspora, 207–27.

40 Love, Heather, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).Google Scholar

41 Barber, Stephen M. and Clark, David L., eds., “Introduction: Queer Moments: The Performative Temporalities of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,” in Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory (New York: Routledge, 2002), 27.Google Scholar

42 Sofian Merabet, “Creating Queer Space in Lebanon: Zones of Encounter within the Lebanese Male Homosexual Sphere,” in Khalaf and Gagnon, Sexuality in the Arab World, 201.

43 See Nader Al Jallad, “The Concepts of al-Halal and al-Haram in Arab-Muslim Culture,” Language Design (2008): 77–86.

44 Siraj, Asifa, “On Being Homosexual and Muslim: Conflicts and Challenges,” in Islamic Sexualities, ed. Ouzgane, Lahoucine (London: Zed Books, 2006), 210.Google Scholar

45 Meem, Bareed, 15–16.

46 Jared McCormick, “Transition Beirut: Gay Identities, Lived Realities,” in Khalaf and Gagnon, Sexuality in the Arab World, 250.

47 Ibid., 192.

48 Probyn, Blush, 14.

49 Meem, Bareed, 54.

50 Ibid., 56.

51 Ibid., 61.

52 Probyn, Blush, 3.

53 Ibid., 3.

54 Butler, Judith, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 23.Google Scholar

55 Meem, Bareed, 76.

56 Ibid., 217.

57 See Georgis, Dina, “The Perils of Belonging and Cosmopolitan Optimism: An Affective Reading of the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict,” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 12 (2007): 242–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Simon, Roger, A Touch of the Past: Remembrance, Learning and Ethics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Edkins, Jenny, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58 Meem, Bareed, 51.

59 Ibid., 36.

60 Ibid., 148.

61 Ibid., 105.

62 Ibid., 37.

63 Probyn, Blush, 72.

64 Ibid., 55.

65 Ibid., 162.

66 Ibid., xiii.

67 Meem, Bareed, 18.

68 Ibid., 61.

69 Ibid., 96–97.

70 Probyn, Blush, ix.

71 Meem, Bareed, 176.

72 Ibid., 185.

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid., 183.

75 Ibid.