Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism, Queer Strategies, and Recursive Time

In this talk, Ghassan Moussawi highlights the importance of queer situations, queer temporalities, and everyday life disruptions in our current moment. Drawing on his recently published book Disruptive Situations, Moussawi challenge representations of contemporary Beirut as an exceptional space for LGBTQ people by examining everyday life disruptions in a city where violence is the norm. The talk uncovers the underlying processes of what Moussawi calls “fractal orientalism,” a relational understanding of modernity and cosmopolitanism that illustrates how transnational discourses of national and sexual exceptionalism operate on multiple scales in the Arab world. Moussawi’s ethnography features the voices of queer women, gay men, and genderqueer individuals in Beirut to examine how queer individuals negotiate life amidst everyday violence. He examines “ al-wad’,” or “the situation,” to understand the practices that form these strategies and to raise questions about queer-friendly spaces in and beyond Beirut. Moussawi argues that the daily survival strategies in Beirut are queer—and not only enacted by LGBTQ people—since Beirutis are living amidst an already queer situation of ongoing precarity.

Zoom link https://lafayette.zoom.us/j/92613454975

Ghassan Moussawi is Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work lies in the areas of transnational gender and sexuality studies, queer of color critique, and postcolonial feminisms, focusing on the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, empire, and nation. His book Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut, (Temple University Press, 2020) winner of the 2021 National Women's Studies Association’s Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize and the Sociology of Sexualities 2021 Distinguished Book Award, investigates everyday life disruptions and violence, and queer formations in post-war Beirut.