Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut

Disruptive Situations

Ghassan Moussawi, Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, and Sociology

Disruptive Situations challenges representations of contemporary Beirut as an exceptional space for LGBTQ people by highlighting everyday life in a city where violence is the norm. Ghassan Moussawi, a Beirut native, seeks to uncover the underlying processes of what he 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.