Beirut Is Burning Drag in the Creation of Queer Lebanese Identities.Pdf
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Beirut is Burning Drag in the Creation of Queer Lebanese Identities By Shereen Elsayed Advised by Professor Firat Oruc A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Award of Honors in Culture and Politics, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Spring 2019. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Background 1 Note on Language and Terminology 4 Thesis Overview 7 Methodology 9 Research in Beirut 9 Theoretical Framework 13 Queer Theory 16 Postcolonial Theory 25 Contextualizing Beirut 38 Chapter 1: 46 Drag as a Hybrid: Foreign Influences and Local Responses 46 American Drag 48 The New York Ballroom Culture in Paris is Burning 48 RuPaul’s Drag Race 50 Finding Drag: The Initial Lebanese Reception of American Drag 55 Queering the Binary: The Gay International and American Drag 59 Appropriation and Transformation: The Hybridity of Drag in Beirut 63 Chapter 2: 73 Contesting Drag: Anti-Femininity and the Exclusion of Women 73 Institutionalized Heterosexuality 74 The Heterosexual Matrix and Anti-femininity 78 Drag: Exploration, Affirmation and Subversion 83 Women: Carving Out Spaces 94 Chapter 3: 99 Queer Resistance: Drag and the (Re)Making of the Self 99 Queer Organizing: Helem and Meem 102 Dragging “Resistance” 109 Conclusion: Futurities of Drag 121 References 127 1 Introduction Background The idea for this project began to take shape in my freshman year, when I was introduced to RuPaul’s Drag Race (hereafter referred to as RPDR). I was exposed to something that I struggled to understand as it was new but also familiar: Egyptian cinema has a long history of cross-dressing that was inserted for comedic effect and, sometimes, to enable the protagonists to claim spaces or activities from which they were barred. RPDR, however, dealt with drag in a serious manner as it was the contestants’ profession and the participants had so much to gain from the competition. The show demonstrated the queens’ various points of view on why they were doing drag and what it represented to them, giving weight to the art form while challenging normative notions of gender. This provoked me to begin exploring the online community around the show, other drag artists in the United States and the conversations around gender and sexuality with which the LGBTQ+ community grappled. The tv series was a catalyst for me to think about the implications of denouncing gender and sexual norms and how drag performers engage with and rework these hegemonic understandings to tell their personal narratives of not fitting in and question the rigidity of these concepts. Thus the drag that I first became most familiar was the American version, which is born out of a post-Stonewall context and heavily informed by American values and a consumerist culture. It is also based upon televised and social media, not live shows. The first live drag show I saw was in London by The LipSinkers; this gave me a profound appreciation for drag and continues to inspire me. Attending the show in person 2 removed the distance experienced of watching on a screen. One particular part of the performance struck me: one member, a female drag queen, wore female attire and simulated sex with a male drag queen, who was presenting as male. As the show progressed, the performers exchanged clothes, switching gender identities and playing with androgynous aesthetics. Simultaneously, they disrupted gendered sexual scripts by assuming various sexual positions that did not correspond with their gender presentations. The performance deconstructed the associations between body, gender and sexuality in only a few minutes. Unlike RPDR, where a narrative is produced through processes such as editing, one that caters to the sentiments and dispositions of the target audience, live drag shows provide a greater space for the performers to present radical critique of the associations between sex, gender and sexuality. Directing my attention to the concept of an audience and the interaction between setting and performance in generating ideas and feelings. The geographical and temporal context proved to be fundamental in understanding drag performances, demonstrated by the shows I attended in Copenhagen, Denmark. The local drag, besides being inspired and shaped by the drag exhibited on RPDR, responded to and debated Danish conceptions of gender and sexuality and other cultural issues including the avoidance of discomfort in the interest of maintaining an ambiance of hygge or wellbeing. This helped me understand how the mainstream culture in each of the countries shaped the format, subculture and aesthetics, resulting in various levels of difference. I started thinking of how I could translate these experiences into a project that would be relevant to me as an Arab. 3 The hosting of former contestants from RPDR in Beirut directed my attention to the vibrant and growing drag scene there. The main challenge I faced, however, was the fact that all my knowledge of drag was based upon its Western manifestations and its relationships to the development of queer movements in these settings. I had to find a way to decenter this, for such understanding of drag and the LGBTQ+ community, especially in an American context, would have influenced my perspective, positioning me from outside, looking in, if it had not been for my time in Beirut. My observations would have been directed by what I expect to see in an American drag show, attempting to find differences and similarities, rather than developing an understanding of the dynamics that allow for a drag scene to flourish. Yet during my fieldwork, I quickly discovered that my experience with American drag and queer culture was shared by many drag performers, as they contended too with what this influence means to them and their art. RuPaul’s Drag Race was their introduction to drag as well.1 The show was an integral part of the performers’ experiences, for they conceptualized their drag personas, emulated some of the formats of the performances on the show and dared to imagine of how successful drag can be. RPDR was a point of affinity between the interviewees and me that enabled me to relate to the performers and to decode the drag shows that were modeled on the show to a certain extent. While the drag shows in Beirut display American influences, they are incorporated and resignified to reflect and comment on the local context, revealing a hybrid where cultural tensions are reinterpreted and navigated. 1 Sultana in discussion with the author, January 10th, 2019. 4 Note on Language and Terminology This hybridity of the Lebanese lived experience, the drag performers’ subjectivities, practices and expressions of queerness, point to another site of contention and negotiation, language. Contemporary Arabic does not have a lexicon on gender, sex and sexuality that fully allows those identifying in non-heteronormative ways to express their identities, history and lived experiences and to relate to others.2 The existent colloquial and formal language is embedded in heteronormative cultural traditions, emphasizing the position of an outsider of the queer person, where their queerness is described as deviance or an act, transitory and partial to the whole. Most of the colloquial vocabulary is derogatory, exercising violence on both an epistemological and ontological level, othering gender and sexual non-conforming individuals by evoking feelings of shame and anxiety. They are dehumanized as their identities are reduced to terms such as louti (sodomite) and khinti (effeminate/faggot), which limit their sexual non-conformity to the sexual act or position and characterize their desires as fleeting and perverse, rather than as foundations for the creation of subjectivities.3 While more neutral words like mithli (derived from “same”)4, are emerging in a process of experimentation in colloquial usage in the effort to expand the Arabic language to encompass affirmative queer expressions, they are still tied instances of abuse and violation in the national imagination, prompting some queer Arabs find in English a recourse.5 Although borrowing English terms such as “gay,” “lesbian” and 2 Jad Jaber, “Arab Queer Language: What are the Characteristics of the Language Used Upon, and Within Queer Arab Culture, and How does that Affect the Identity-Formation and Subjectivity of Queer Arab Individuals?,” Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World (2018): 6. 3 Ibid., 13-15. 4 A politically correct formal term used on a national scale especially in the media as a result of efforts by LGBTQ+ oriented NGOs such as Helem. 5 Jaber, “Arab Queer Language,” 20-21. 5 “queer,” a vocabulary describing different unlived Western subjectivities, risks alienating their users as foreign, the meanings of these words are broken open to accommodate new local understandings and definitions. The language on queerness available thus reflects the precariousness of a queer Arab existence, where the lack of physical and linguistic space for queer representations and modes of being to develop serve as limitations aimed at erasure. However, the English language becomes a complex site of appropriation and self- formulation, resembling other efforts of adapting Western queer models, as will be explored later in the thesis. Similarly, I am grappling with the dilemma of how to describe and theorize a Lebanese queer identity reflected in their drag stemming from within the local context. Writing from within Western academia and in English on Lebanese gender identities and sexualities involves