The Affordance of Visibility in the Social Media Videos of LGBT Nonprofits in Lebanon: (In)Visibilities, Representativity and Socio-Political Engagement

Abstract

LGBT nonprofit organizations in Lebanon use social media videos to foreground the rights of sexual minorities in a society that institutionalizes homophobia. Employing content and thematic analysis to study twelve of these videos within the Lebanese sociopolitical context, I examine how the organizations enact the online affordance of visibility to transgress local hegemonic discourses and claim representativity and political rights. Engaging in politics online comes with the fear of offline homophobia. Lebanese LGBT nonprofits have therefore adopted strategies to mitigate offline persecution, including the invisibility of individuals within the visibility of the collective. They have also engaged in Pan-Arab activism and relied on local Arabic terms for sexual minorities to create a more nuanced activism for the Arab region than found in transnational LGBT activism. Keywords: LGBT, Lebanon, nonprofits, social media, visibility