EUME
2022/ 2023

Razan Ghazzawi

From Carceral Geographies to Racialized Borders: A Queer Feminist Ethnography

(they/she) received their PhD in Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Sussex, Brighton. They also hold an MA in Gender, Sexuality, and the Body from the University of Leeds, UK, and an MA in Comparative Literature from Balamand University in Lebanon. In their thesis “Pedagogies of Everyday Queer Protests: Rethinking Political Subjectivity and Violence in Syria and Lebanon 2011-2021,” they examine everyday queer and trans encounters at checkpoints, prisons, and queer asylum in the contexts of ‘war on terror’ and the ‘refugee crisis.’ Based on 10 months of ethnographic and autoethnographic fieldwork, this research looks at how notions of protests, violence, and political subjects have relied on heteronormative and binary logic that ignored nonbinary forms of everyday protests. Razan is a EUME Fellow in the academic year 2022/23. They are a former prisoner from the Syrian state and an award winner of Frontline Defender in 2012.

From Carceral Geographies to Racialized Borders: A Queer Feminist Ethnography

From a positionality of an exiled protestor in Europe and a previous political prisoner in Syria, this postdoctoral project traces the journeys of eight self-identified Syrian and Palestinian LGBTQ artists, workers, performers, and refugees from their temporary locations of exile in Lebanon to their refugee locations in Europe. It explores the interlocutors’ temporal encounters with geographies of checkpoints and prisons in Syria and Lebanon on the one hand, and racialized borders of Europe, on the other. In doing so, this project investigates narratives of what Rima Hammami calls “carceral geographies” (Hammami, 2015) and surviving checkpoints, prisons, and asylum journeys from Syria and Lebanon to Europe. In doing so, this project investigates stories of navigating and surviving racialized borders as LGBTQ refugees of color and explores how this experience is securitized and militarized. Furthermore, this project explores emotional labor and care (Raha 2017) as affective forms of protest in the context of military carceral states in Syria and Lebanon and Europe’s ‘refugee crisis.’ This fellowship will be dedicated to interviewing and exploring the journeys of eight self-identified Syrian and Palestinian LGBTQ persons who fled Syria and Lebanon to Europe and how they view their asylum experiences in relation to previous experiences in Syria and Lebanon.

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