Closets in Conflict: Heteropatriarchal Backlash and the Struggle for LGBTQ+ Liberation in Lebanon and Palestine

Amid unfolding crises, a tide of hetero-patriarchal backlash is sweeping the globe. While predominantly understood as patriarchal resistance to perceived gains in feminist and queer liberation, this project explores backlash as a deeper set of phenomena, through which hetero-patriarchal ‘order’ is being violently (re-)imposed amid a context of global (dis)order.

Binding analysis of global forces to the intimacies of the everyday, this research examines the struggle for – and backlash against – queer liberation across Lebanon and Palestine. Most analyses of backlash focus upon Europe and the Americas, yet LGBTQ+ people are also facing backlash in these Middle Eastern contexts. Exploring backlash here will allow the research team to uniquely explore a confluence of intersecting challenges, including military occupation, conflict, climate change and forced displacement.

Working with existing networks of queer ‘activist-researchers’, this project will collaboratively explore everyday realities of – and resistance to – heteropatriarchal backlash within these under-explored contexts.

Principal Investigator: Dr Philip Proudfoot, Institute of Development Studies