The Devil’s in Decline: Western Anti-Gender Politics and the Evolution of Queerphobia in Lebanon

What the paper says

This article explores a wave of queerphobia that washed over Lebanon in the summer of 2023, some features of which were notably distinct from those of previous moral panics around gender and sexuality in the country. Traditionally moral panics around gender and sexuality in Lebanon have framed queer people as agents of Western imperialism. While this framing continues to fuel these panics, I argue that more recently Lebanese political actors have also begun capitalizing on the so-called Western culture wars to fashion a politically productive image of the West as not only a threat but a harbinger of things to come. Within this framing, the West emerges as having been weakened by the spread of “gender ideology,” in turn presented as an out-of-control contagion that a morally superior but threatened Lebanon must protect itself against. This invites an approach to the increase in and evolution of queerphobia in Lebanon not so much as a reaction to and backlash against LGBTQI+ rights gains in the West but as a convergence and entanglement with a growing Western anti-gender movement. I argue that the Lebanese state and political actors have not merely been passively reacting to the anti-gender movement in the West but actively drawing on it for their own political gain in ways that encourage us to rethink governance and state power in the Global South as more than just reactive to a power imbalance vis-à-vis the West.