Lebanon’s militarized masculinity

This piece was originally published as part of Al-Jumhuriya’s “Gender, Sexuality, and Power” on 20 December 2018. A translation into Arabic was also made by Yasser Alzaiat.

In the summer of 2017, as (unfounded) rumors began to spread on social media of Syrians “going to protest against our honorable army,” a wave of hyper-masculine ultra-nationalism mixed with the usual xenophobia saw random Syrian men targeted by Lebanese men. Videos of Lebanese men filming themselves angrily beating Syrian men in revenge attacks went viral, and the already-intensifying talks of expelling Syrian refugees found themselves, if only for a few days, reaching the mainstream (they have since become even more normalized). Many rightly denounced these videos, but few were those who pointed out that the violence inflicted on Syrians was not just rooted in a quasi-racial sense of superiority, reflective of the otherwise fragile sense of nationalism that the Lebanese themselves often mock, but in the Lebanese idea of masculinity as well.

The topic of Lebanese masculinity has not been widely studied and is in itself an almost-impossible topic to approach in its entirety, given the difficulty of even defining the subject being studied. Does ‘Lebanese’ include only those lucky enough to get the difficult-to-obtain citizenship, itself often a sectarian calculation? Do studies exclude, for…