Sectarianism and the Sodomite: Homophobia, Communal Identity and Globalization in Contemporary Lebanon
Summary: This paper investigates the political production of homophobia and the affective architecture of political sectarianism among Christian communities in contemporary Lebanon. I focus on a case of a 2019 moral panic incited against Mashrou’ Leila – a Lebanese indie-rock band whose music has challenged the social and political status quo of contemporary Arab societies. In fact, Mashrou’ Leila’s band members are vocal activists for LGBT rights in Lebanon and the broader Middle East. Hammed Sinno, the band’s openly gay lead singer, advocates for sexual minority rights on the Internet, radio, and television. Unsurprisingly, the band’s music and activism have produced backlash from a variety of social and political actors in the region. Just weeks before Mashrou’ Leila’s August 9th performance at the Byblos International Music Festival in Lebanon, a homophobic moral panic swept across Lebanese Christian communities that surpassed any previous attempt at artistic censorship. Taking this case as my starting point, I ask the following questions: how is homophobia drawn into and articulated through a politics of sectarianism? In what ways does homophobia work to reproduce the discursive boundaries and affective architecture of sect and state? And finally, how does the construction of a nefarious “homosexual threat” work to stage a civilizational conflict between a hyper-aggressive global and an increasingly vulnerable local?
Informed by logics of preservation, fears of extermination, and apocalyptic visions of sectarian civil strife, I argue that homophobia works as a technology of sectarian re-entrenchment. Homophobia activates sectarian modes of knowing, being, and believing, discredits competing secular visions of society and state, and provides an opportunity for the performance of communal autonomy and sovereignty. Anchoring homophobia in arguments about religious freedom of conscience, Christian citizens, activists, and leaders figure the homosexual as inherently antithetical to religious pluralism in Lebanon. In this way, Christian communities articulate their political claims and anxieties through a universal language of religious freedom. For those vocal opponents of Mashrou` Leila, global homosexuality poses an epistemic threat to the integrity and survival of centuries-old religious communities – a problematic to which sectarianism was historically considered the political solution. As such, homophobia allows Christian communities to tether their fate to that of the overarching state, producing homosexuality as a crime against the constitutionally consecrated religious pillars of Lebanese society. In short, homophobia contributes to the consolidation of sectarian politics and identification.
By figuring homosexuality as inherently destructive of communal difference, and by associating homosexuality with a secular, morally corrupt West, sectarianism is figured as a fortress protecting the local from the perversions of globalization. Foregrounding political homophobia allows us to take stock of the moral politics that emerge in response to globalization. Across myriad contexts, local “culture” is figured as threatened by the homogenizing and homosexualizing processes of globalization. Such anxieties inform the affective activation of right-wing nationalisms in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. In Lebanon, latent and fascistic Christian nationalisms bubble up to the surface as homophobia activates sectarian identification. Homophobia, then, should not be dismissed as an effect of imperial encroachment and LGBT-rights promotion; rather, it proves to be a potent political force that facilitates the promotion of exclusionary visions of society and state. Christian reactions, moreover, could not be easily dismissed by other sects because of the ubiquitous threat homosexuality poses to all religious communities. The homophobic moral panic – as well as the shared language of religious toleration and freedom of conscience – worked to mask the strategic interest that Christians have in maintaining a sectarian political system.
In Lebanon, religious pluralism – figured as indigenous and authentic – is viewed as endangered by sexual pluralism – seen as a foreign perversion of imperial globalization. This logic erases the indigenously articulated life-worlds of sexual and gender minorities throughout the region, past and present. More, and because of the cross-sectarian nature of anti-homosexual sentiment and the imagined relationship between homosexuality and secularism, homophobia becomes a potent mechanism to delegitimize secular projects in opposition to the sectarian political system. Interestingly, the association between secularism and homosexuality is also shared by secular-identifying Lebanese citizens. For them, the harrowing experience of sectarianism in Lebanon facilitates a romanticized imaginary of secularism. Many of my LGBT interlocutors expressed the idea that secularism is the necessary first step – if not solution – to LGBT emancipation and rights. For these secularists, sectarianism allows for the public expression of religious sentiments, norms, and mores that are hostile to sexual and gender minorities. Such an understanding points to religiosity as the most formidable obstacle to LGBT acceptance; religious sensibilities are figured as inherently antithetical to the struggles of sexual and gender minorities. Thus, secularism will confine religion to the private. It will forbid religion from informing public life and curtailing individual rights. But these secularists remain a minority, with an overwhelming majority of Lebanese citizens desiring a public role for religion.
The outbreak of street demonstrations and protests in October 2019 propelled these questions to the forefront of national consciousness, shaking the affective foundations of political sectarianism. More than half of the Lebanese population took to the streets, uniting around everyday issues of economic precarity, decaying infrastructure, and political corruption – issues that today, have brought the country to imminent collapse. Despite the revolutionary fervor of October 2019 and the months following it, the past year and a half has witnessed not only the survival of political sectarianism, but it’s upgrading. Although the so-called “legitimacy” of sectarian leaders has been irreversibly shaken, the affective architecture of group identification in Lebanon is formidable, relying on ontologies of fear that point to threats against the collective existence, presence, and life of the local group(s). The broader dissertation project aims to bring into bold relief the scaffolding that holds Lebanese sectarianism (and this broader politics of tribalism) in place. A crucial part of this political work unfolds on the site of gender and sexuality. Until serious ethnographic work engages with these processes, arguments about inauthenticity and foreignness will continue to be peddled in the service of maintaining an unjust status quo. The case of Mashrou` Leila ultimately reveals how the invisibility and containment of sexual minorities is figured as a pre-condition for religious pluralism. Sectarianism becomes the way in which to contain one form of pluralism for the consolidation of another.