A Cultural Analysis of the Abduction of Westerners in Lebanon in the 1980s

This dissertation considers the images and texts produced about the western hostages who were kidnapped and held in Lebanon between 1985 and 1991. My approach is interdisciplinary and is cognizant of a variety of concerns shared among the fields of Middle Eastern history, post-colonial, gay and lesbian, and cultural studies. Chapter One examines five major official investigations into the Iran-Contra affair. I ask why certain questions were investigated and others were not, and note a series of interventions that limited the scope of the investigations. This chapter also considers how the investigations shaped the predominant questions that eventually dominated popular perceptions of the abductions and of the Iran-Contra affair. In my second chapter I concentrate on Maroun Baghdadi's film, Hors la vie. The film reveals political, ideological, and historical aspects of France's intervention in the Levant, and of the socio-political repercussions of this intervention on contemporary French public and political life. This chapter considers how these repercussions are given expression cinematically in the film's repetition of distinct representations of the city of Beirut. Chapter Three unpacks the themes and narrative structures that shape the representation of the experience of captivity in the captivity memoirs. I also ask: What markers of identity were deployed by the western men to identify themselves to their fellow captives? And, How are the Lebanese men marked as subject to western authority through the demarcation of certain differences and identities? In my fourth chapter I focus on the socio-sexual aspects of the encounters between westerners and Arabs, and more specifically between western and Arab men as they are represented in the captivity memoirs. I analyze the representations of the various bonds that developed between the western men, and between the western men and their Lebanese Muslim male captors. I also consider and challenge, through the writings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sara Suleri, Mary Louise Pratt, and Joseph Boone, the persistent foreclosing on the homoerotics of Orientalism in critical analyses of the encounters between western and non-western men.