Non-Cock Fights: On Doing "Sex" and Undoing "Gender" in Shatila, Lebanon

Abstract

Using a workshop on “gender” held at a NGO and pigeonraising as cues, this article exposes the difficulties entailed by framing the experiences of the young men (shabâb) from the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon as “gender-performance”. Indeed, “gender” as a concept does not work at all settings and at all times. While it serves to illuminate the biographies of the shabâb’s fathers, the fidâ(iyyîn (fighters), whose coming-of-age was very much informed by the fight to return to their homeland, it fails to capture the experience of those, like today’s shabâb from Shatila, with very limited access to elements of power. Rather than framing the shabâb as “emasculated”, for not being able to properly “perform” a “gender”, due to the political-economic constraints placed upon them, I rather take issue with “gender” itself. Accordingly, this study suggests that as “gender” circulates in a semantic universe defined by the quest for political power, the concept raises issues when applied to anti-State settings like today’s Shatila – a problematic not at all alien to Clastres’s line of reasoning.