Crafting radical opposition or reproducing homonormativity? Consociationalism and LGBT rights activism in Lebanon

ABSTRACT

There is little research on the struggles surrounding gay rights in divided societies emerging from intrastate conflict and characterized by consociational power sharing, which allocates rights to the main ethnic groups. While consociational arrangements – predicated on a minority rights regime – theoretically open up constitutional space for LGBT rights, they often negate such possibilities by empowering ethnic hardliners opposed to sexual minorities. This article explores how Lebanese LGBT activists conceptualize rights and craft mobilization tactics and strategies. I focus on an “identity dilemma” faced by Lebanese activists: to create a public identity for rights demands or to elide such a process. While the former strategy seeks openings in the power sharing structure, the latter aims for a radical form of resistance against the sectarianism of consociationalism. Activists pursuing the latter strategy, moreover, see consociationalism as encouraging an LGBT mobilization that reproduces the sectarian system and is complicit with homonormativity.

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Notes on contributor

John Nagle is a lecturer in the Institute for Conflict, Transition, and Peace Research, University of Aberdeen. He has previously held positions at INCORE, a United Nations Research Centre for the Study of Conflict at the University of Ulster and as lecturer at the University of East London. John has also been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies at the University of Exeter. He has published three books, including Shared Society or Benign Apartheid? and a number of journal articles. John's new book is entitled Social Movements in Violently Divided Societies: Constructing Conflict and Peacebuilding.

Notes

1. Although Lebanon has been framed as a Christian/Muslim conflict, the civil war was extremely complex, involving leftist factions, and a leading role for regional forces, including the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Israel, and Syria. Moreover, alliances and cleavages have shifted since the 2005 Cedar Revolution, as Lebanese politics increasingly divides along a Shia and Sunni split, with Christians discordantly divided amongst the two blocs. These rival blocs are also respectively tied to Iran/Syria and Saudi Arabia (Nagle 2015).