Queering Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon

This essay explores the asymmetric impact of an emerging and increasingly normalized refugee crisis on LGBT+ politics/advocacy in risk societies through an intersectional lens. It adapts Crenshaw’s three-dimensional forms of intersectionality as a framework to challenge the idea that refugee crises are exceptional. Drawing on informal conversations, published policies, reports, and news covered by invested parties, this ethnographic case study disrupts generalized hegemonic discourses on Lebanon’s perpetual state of crisis that manipulates security construction and normalizes heteronational attitudes and ad hoc strategies that complicate the localization of global LGBT+ rights in times of crises. It contextualizes the resonance and/or alienation of global crises on local governance of queer Syrian refugee identities and agency. This study offers a complex understanding of LGBT+ politics and global crises in liquid modernity, where compounded forms of privilege and oppression shape the precariousness of queer Syrians’ experiences and agency in the case of Lebanon.