Shock Me if You Can! An Exploration of Queerness in Beirut
My research project initiates a dialogue between shock and culture in Beirut, Lebanon, where regional disconnects, colonial histories and pseudo religious socio-political powers intersect normativity with continuous instabilities. In this framework, ‘the other’ becomes a queer “strange” entity whose positionality within the dominant hetero-normative system carries a shocking trait in the matter it exists, maneuvers, and resists already unstable terrains. I redefine shock as an investigative lens rather than mere trauma, understanding it as a temporal, affective, and relational experience shaped by triggers, players, and culture. In addition, by using queer as a reference term for LGBT subjectivities as well as in relation to acts and practices, queer theory helps frame the discussion around normativity and its relation to shock in our Middle Eastern condition. The applied methodology of queer of color critique that centers on race, gender, sexuality and class pushes to rethink the discourse of queerness from a transnational perspective and transcend colonial structures of knowledge and power. The introduction of such a perspective highlights the complexities of normativity, queering, and cultural identity in Lebanon while prompting new avenues of critical examination. Crossing hierarchical binaries and linear narratives lies in a sort of a (shocking) destruction that may aid to rebuild alterity to established arrangements – which Sara Ahmed (2014) suggests as a way to look at the worn and torn, and where the shattering can be powerful. This places the Lebanese queer body as a political site who reframes established cultural materials by countering heteronormative logics of desires and sexualities, and the affect behind what is deemed inappropriately insignificant in the history of the region. I explore shock’s manifestations in both digital and material landscapes, first through a visual analysis of Mohamad Khansa’s music video Khayef, a candid portrayal of shock through the art of Raqs Sharqi (oriental dance), particularly in the matter that the male body destabilizes established normativity by attesting the strict gendered craft. Secondly, I pivot toward the protest grounds, recounting the events surrounding the October 17th Revolution of 2019 where I encounter the shocking tag Luté mech msabbé which translates nonliterally to “referring to someone as a fag (homosexual) is not an insult.” Seen as out of context with the dominant ‘dialogue of the street,’ this act of countering creates a sense of queer optimism that engages affective structures of hope within both the temporal present and its future. Thirdly, as a queer researcher, I integrate lived experiences that encourage a reflexive approach when recalling the event of the August 4th Beirut port explosion in 2020. Informed by Gayatri Gopinath (2018), I present my own arts-based response in the form of an exhibition piece that triangulates aesthetic practices, queerness, and diaspora. The queer perspective established by these practices directs the attention towards the vitality of nonnormativity by reframing the shock into a productive force that challenges its notion of destructiveness. This helps reimagine queer alterity into ‘a condition of possibilities’ (Muñoz 2006), prompting a broader perspective into non-normativity and queerness as potentiality.

Keywords: Shock, Queerness, Beirut, Queer theory, LGBT subjectivities, Acts of countering, Alterity, Queer potentiality