Is there a gay international? : an analysis of homosexuality on Lebanese musalsalat -

Abstract

This study examines three Lebanese musalsalat, Min Kol Albi (Al-Jadeed), Ajyal (MTV), and Ichk Al Nisaa (LBCI), and argues that homosexuality is represented as a national “other.” As media spectacles expose a discourse of the homosexual as a societal threat, there are new implications for emerging melodramatic portrayals dealing with homosexuality. Scholarship on sexuality in the Arab region recognizes a discourse questioning the authenticity or foreignness of such a sexuality at all. While one reading may suggest that new portrayals represent homosexuality as incompatible with the region, another offers that it is hypervisibilized as a destabilizing, foreign sexuality in the quest for national consolidation. In the same vein, media panics in the region centered around gender, sexuality, and authenticity offer insight into discourses of the nation and the “other,” drawing parallels to fictional portrayals of the homosexual. As melodrama affords a moral legibility and presents a portrayal of “how things should be,” homosexuality presents not only a contrast to hegemonic masculinities, but to hegemonic nationalisms as well.