Dr. Ghassan Moussawi Distinguished Lecture: Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut
AKD + Sociology@VCU Distinguished Lecture Series
Speaker: Ghassan Moussawi (Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois—Urbana Champaign)
October 13, Tuesday, 2020 via Zoom

Dr. Moussawi will talk about his book, Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut (Temple University Press). Disruptive Situations challenges representations of contemporary Beirut as an exceptional space for LGBTQ people by highlighting everyday life disruptions in a city where violence is the norm. The book 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 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.

To join the conversation, please RSVP by Oct 11. RSVP via link: https://rb.gy/g7qksw

The organizer will contact with the Zoom link and the password. For any questions, welcome contact Alexandra Quezada (arquezada@vcu.edu) or Ying-Chao Kao (yckao@vcu.edu).

Resources:
Ghassan Moussawi's (2020) Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut is free to read at VCU Library: https://bit.ly/3mXOi8T

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