Omar Safadi is a PhD Candidate in the department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research is anchored in contemporary Lebanon, where he studies the politics of sexuality, sectarianism, and civil war. Based on two years of ethnographic and on-site fieldwork, his dissertation asks the following: what are the political uses and effects of homophobia in Lebanese sectarianism? And what can the Lebanese example tell us about the organizing work of homophobia in religiously plural political orders? Rather than viewing homophobia as consolidating dominant, majoritarian, or authoritarian orders, Omar uses the Lebanese case to show homophobia’s effects on processes of political division and sectarianization: on sub-national group-formation, boundary-fortification, and war-making. Across several episodes of anti-gay political incitement, the dissertation illustrates the ways in which homophobia activates in-group identities (chapter 1), securitizes communal territorial boundaries (chapter 2), produces inter-sectarian federation (chapter 3), and organizes inter-imperial war within and across state borders (chapter 4). It argues that homophobia constellates specific and diachronic problem-spaces around communal violation, geopolitical predation, and the loss of self-determination. Above all, the dissertation attempts to illustrate how homophobia’s articulation in Lebanon depends upon historic and ongoing conditions of civil war, military occupation, and geopolitical intervention.

Omar holds a Master’s degree in Political Science and a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago. His master’s thesis, “Sectarianism and the Sodomite: Homophobia, Communal Identity, and Globalization in Lebanon,” theorizes homophobia as a technology of sectarian re-entrenchment in Christian Maronite communities.