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

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I study Middle Eastern everyday practices of family and nation in Lebanon as constructed and practicedby the local LGBTQI+ people.The idea of the Middle Eastern family is often invoked as an orientalist stereotype, but local everydayfamily practices are rarely examined. Similarly, a wealth of literature on Middle Eastern nationalismsexists, but ethnographic research on how local people negotiate identity and belonging in their dailyinteractions remains scarce. Furthermore, often the views are a-historical in that the Middle East isunderstood as stagnant and unchanging, while the diversity of its geographical, cultural and politicalsystems 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 tounderstand 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 emergingconflicts.I focus on the "family" and "nation" as historically constructed, politically applied and yet corporeally andsocially 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 sexualidentities and experiences, as they inhibit the double position of being rooted in the local socio-politicalorder, while also resisting and renewing it from the inside.