Material belongings: Family and nation as lived by members of LGBTQ+ in Lebanon

I study Middle Eastern everyday practices of family and nation in Lebanon as constructed and practiced
by the local LGBTQI+ people.
The idea of the Middle Eastern family is often invoked as an orientalist stereotype, but local everyday
family practices are rarely examined. Similarly, a wealth of literature on Middle Eastern nationalisms
exists, but ethnographic research on how local people negotiate identity and belonging in their daily
interactions remains scarce. Furthermore, often the views are a-historical in that the Middle East is
understood as stagnant and unchanging, while the diversity of its geographical, cultural and political
systems is reduced to a spatially homogenous and equally orientalist notion of 'Arab' or 'Islamic'
cultures.
As such, studying the everyday ways that people 'do' family and nationality is needed in order to
understand intersectional differences and localized Middle Eastern forms of sociability and personhood,
as well as how larger societal structures such as the nation-state shapes local expressions and emerging
conflicts.
I focus on the "family" and "nation" as historically constructed, politically applied and yet corporeally and
socially lived, complex practices which on the one hand maintain, and on the other renew and challenge,
the state apparatus, religious institutions and other structures of hegemonic social order. In this research,
I approach these phenomena from the vantage point of marginalised and disputed gender and sexual
identities and experiences, as they inhibit the double position of being rooted in the local socio-political
order, while also resisting and renewing it from the inside.