The Political Economy of Feminist Organizing in Lebanon during the economic crisis (2019 - 2022)

Through my work, I examine feminist activism in Lebanon during the period from 2019 to 2022 marked by a popular uprising, and an economic crisis characterized as one of the worst in the country’s modern history. I mainly aim to understand the ways through which the economic structures and context during this period have impacted, shaped and continue to shape feminist activism in Lebanon. To conduct my work, I turn to theories of Queer of Color (QOC) critique which build on Marxist analyses of capitalist political economies. I specifically mobilize Roderick Ferguson’s articulation of QOC critique which provides elaborate analyses of the interlocking systems of oppression, based on gender, sex, race and class, and of how they operate in the context of capitalist political economies. I aim to show that radical feminist organizing in Lebanon is fundamentally shaped, structured and hindered by existing economic structures broadly, and by international funding structures more specifically. Through a series of 20 interviews conducted between 2022 and 2024 with feminist activists in Beirut, I explore the impacts of the economic conditions on feminist collective actions and organizing, and on the dynamics and power relations between feminist activists and within feminist spaces, focusing on race and class power relations. I also analyze the role of funding structures and their impact on feminist work, priorities and internal power relations. Through this work, I seek to examine the (im)possibilities created by the economic and political context for building and promoting radical, antipatriarchal, antiracist and anti-capitalist feminist work in Lebanon. Finally, I mobilize QOC’s focus on deconstructing and revisiting categories such as the nation-state and capital in the process of understanding the role of the state in creating the economic and political conditions that limit the possibilities of forging sustainable and more solid radical feminist modes of organizing.