Queering Beirut, the ‘Paris of the Middle East’: fractal Orientalism and essentialized masculinities in contemporary gay travelogues

Moussawi, Ghassan

doi:10.1080/0966369x.2012.753586

Cited by 28 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Thus, intersections of race/ethnicity, gender, class, and nationalism have received little attention within the study of LGBT tourism (Puar, 2002a). One of the scholars who does utilize such an intersectional approach is Moussawi (2013), who discusses gay men's tourism to Beirut. He claims that, although representations of Beirut by tourists abandon the East/ West binary, they end up introducing essentialist Orientalist understandings of people and places, failing to include the intersectional experiences of Middle Eastern men.…”

Section: Gay Tourism: a Non-western Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

The progressive Orient: Gay tourism to Tel Aviv and Israeli ethnicities

Hartal

Sasson‐Levy

2019

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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Tel Aviv is becoming a hotspot for gay tourism through the support of municipal and national forces. The city is marketed as a Middle Eastern gay utopia, drawing tourists due to its location, LGBT nightlife, and Oriental flavor. Meanwhile, local Israeli LGBT individuals strive to produce themselves as Western, both performatively and politically. This paper discusses how the Tel Aviv Municipality, the state, commercial actors, and LGBT individuals utilize Israeli ethnicities. We argue that the dissonance between Orientalist images and Westernization processes, which are particularly noticeable in the marketing of gay tourism to Tel Aviv, maintains a twofold construction of Tel Aviv as a Middle Eastern global city, which we term the Progressive Orient. Reinforcing the differentiation from the Middle East and other Arab countries, while embracing Orientalist images and tastes under the guise of authenticity, this particular kind of pinkwashing also differentiates the city as other than the rest of Israel. This in turn creates new nuances of ethnic Israeli gayness illustrated by an emerging gay Mizrahi culture.

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Section: Gay Tourism: a Non-western Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

The progressive Orient: Gay tourism to Tel Aviv and Israeli ethnicities

Hartal

Sasson‐Levy

2019

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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“…As for the present, the commercial takes place in Rome, thus signalling transnational mobility and the remembering of Africa's role in global historical processes and interactions that extend beyond slavery, colonialism and conquest (Hodgson and Byfield ). More so, as Rome is notable for its history of progress/modernity (one that often erases Africa in this telling of history), the two African bodies are inscribed in this space, disrupting linear notions of time and myths about Africa's timelessness—while making the body visible and “intelligible” (Moussawi :859). Thus, in Rome, the African body is not “encountered in the authentic local geography imagined back into the ‘native’ context in order to conform to and complete the terms of the colonialist fantasy” (Alexander 2001:201, cited in Mousawi :865).…”

Section: No Scent Makes Sense? Race Place‐making and Africa's Risementioning

confidence: 99%

“…More so, as Rome is notable for its history of progress/modernity (one that often erases Africa in this telling of history), the two African bodies are inscribed in this space, disrupting linear notions of time and myths about Africa's timelessness—while making the body visible and “intelligible” (Moussawi :859). Thus, in Rome, the African body is not “encountered in the authentic local geography imagined back into the ‘native’ context in order to conform to and complete the terms of the colonialist fantasy” (Alexander 2001:201, cited in Mousawi :865). Concomitantly, the very “scent” of Africa, thanks to the metaphysics of presence, becomes part of transnational space, inhaled and incorporated onto the global map of modernity, while its waft blows out the lights, thereby snuffing out western notions of enlightenment.…”

Section: No Scent Makes Sense? Race Place‐making and Africa's Risementioning

confidence: 99%

A “Scented Declaration of Progress”: Globalisation, Afropolitan Imagineering and Familiar Orientations

Ogunyankin

2018

Antipode

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Branded as “Africa's first luxury perfume”, the Scent of Africa perfume is a “scented declaration of progress”. Particularly fascinating is the commercial advertisement for the perfume, which I argue to be an “Afropolitan Imagineering” project that is intended to signal Africa's rise and its new association with global cosmopolitanism. At first glance, the Scent of Africa perfume advertisement seems to point to the ways in which Imagineering projects can reproduce colonial discourses about Africanness. However, in this article, I suggest that we complicate the advertisement and examine its subversive potential to decentre whiteness and celebrate Africanness while writing Africa into the world. Despite this subversion, I conclude that African worlding practices should disinherit the familiarity of Eurocentric geographic determinism that is embedded in Afropolitan Imagineering and instead become informed by afro‐futuristic imaginings and disidentification politics.

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“…Accounting for about 65 percent of all tourists to the country (Blanford ), some are attracted to Beirut's famed “adult playground” activities of beach resorts along the Mediterranean, rooftop bars, nightclubs, and prostitution, while others seek out family‐friendly leisure spaces adhering to Islamic notions of respectability (Deeb and Harb ). Niche Lebanese tourism markets include gay tourism directed at European and American men (McCormick ; Moussawi ), healthcare tourism directed at consumers of medical and reproductive services (Inhorn ), and religious tourism geared toward members of the Lebanese Christian Diaspora (Pasquier ).…”

Section: Touring Lebanon and The Arab Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring Nature, Making the Nation: The Spatial Politics of Ecotourism in Lebanon

Monroe

2016

PoLAR

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This article explores how Lebanese ecotourism sites and excursions present a spatial narrative marked by aspirations for a consolidated nation that connects the rural and the urban across a diverse ecological terrain. Employing several ecotourism projects as case studies, I argue that ideas about nation-making that are rooted in embodied interaction with and awareness of the natural landscape engender a form of national territorialization that relies not upon staying "in place" but rather through the very mobility of the citizentraveler across the national space. A central aim of my analysis of ecotourism, in a country strained by geographical divisions entangled with complex issues of national belonging, is to broaden the conversation within anthropology about the political life and spatial dimensions of domestic tourism within the Global South. [tourism, nation, space, Lebanon, conflict]

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Queering Beirut, the ‘Paris of the Middle East’: fractal Orientalism and essentialized masculinities in contemporary gay travelogues

Cited by 28 publications

References 25 publications

The progressive Orient: Gay tourism to Tel Aviv and Israeli ethnicities

The progressive Orient: Gay tourism to Tel Aviv and Israeli ethnicities

A “Scented Declaration of Progress”: Globalisation, Afropolitan Imagineering and Familiar Orientations

Exploring Nature, Making the Nation: The Spatial Politics of Ecotourism in Lebanon

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