Dr. Gustavo Barbosa

I’m a Brazilian anthropologist and journalist, with MScs in Anthropology from Museu Nacional/Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and The London School of Economics and Political Science, and a PhD, also in Anthropology, from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Currently, I’m an Associate Researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Universidade Federal Fluminense (NEOM/UFF), in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The Best of Hard Times - Palestinian Refugee Masculinities in Lebanon

The Best of Hard Times explores the gendered subjectivties of two generations of men in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. I compare the fida’iyyin, the men who served as freedom fighters to reconquer Palestine in the 1970s, to the shabab, their sons who lead seemingly mundane lives with limited access to power.

The Best of Hard Times - Palestinian Refugee Masculinities in Lebanon

The Best of Hard Times explores the gendered subjectivties of two generations of men in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. I compare the fida’iyyin, the men who served as freedom fighters to reconquer Palestine in the 1970s, to the shabab, their sons who lead seemingly mundane lives with limited access to power.

Academic Interest & Commitment

My academic interest and commitment lie with those who are left out by academic and theoretical discourses and frameworks, national and international policies of various kinds and modes of production and reproduction.

Beginnings

My first lengthy academic engagement, which resulted in my MSc dissertation The Sociality against the State, engaged with Pierre Clastres, an ethnographer considered as “minor” by some. In reality, and as suggested by Deleuze, “minor” and “major” do not designate intrinsic characteristics of authors, but rather “operations” or “surgeries” to which their texts are subjected. Such “operations” can unleash unexplored potentialities in their works, and this is precisely what I discovered in Clastres’s case. By extracting the much-criticized concept of “society” from his books and articles, I came across, rather unexpectedly, with the idea of “sociality,” very much in line with what a later anthropology would also come up with.

Beginnings

My first lengthy academic engagement, which resulted in my MSc dissertation The Sociality against the State, engaged with Pierre Clastres, an ethnographer considered as “minor” by some. In reality, and as suggested by Deleuze, “minor” and “major” do not designate intrinsic characteristics of authors, but rather “operations” or “surgeries” to which their texts are subjected. Such “operations” can unleash unexplored potentialities in their works, and this is precisely what I discovered in Clastres’s case. By extracting the much-criticized concept of “society” from his books and articles, I came across, rather unexpectedly, with the idea of “sociality,” very much in line with what a later anthropology would also come up with.

Book

In the case of my PhD thesis – which served as the basis for my monograph, The Best of Hard Times – Palestinian Refugee Masculinities in Lebanon, in press by Syracuse (2021) –, I was challenged by the presence, in the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, in the southern outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon, with men, like the shabab or lads from the camp, with very limited economic and political-military power. The shabab find no comfortable place in nationalistic discourses or hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy frameworks, which normally require men to be in positions of power. The specialized literature and media coverage tend to present men like the Shatila shabab as in crisis, precisely for not being able to fulfill the demands of a misogynist and atavistic hegemonic masculinity. But, in fact, they are not and, thus, I was prompted to promote another crisis, of an epistemological nature: the crisis of gender as a discourse on power.

Current Research

At the moment, I am taking my first steps towards my next research project, again about people left out: gay couples in Israel, whose desires to have children are not as of today contemplated by policies disciplining surrogacy in the country. Faced with what Marcia Inhorn would describe as “reproductive exile,” they need to search for surrogate mothers abroad.

Precisely because I deal, in my research, with people who are left out, I am also interested on registering how they and I myself grapple with hope.

Current Research

At the moment, I am taking my first steps towards my next research project, again about people left out: gay couples in Israel, whose desires to have children are not as of today contemplated by policies disciplining surrogacy in the country. Faced with what Marcia Inhorn would describe as “reproductive exile,” they need to search for surrogate mothers abroad.

Precisely because I deal, in my research, with people who are left out, I am also interested on registering how they and I myself grapple with hope.

The Best of Hard Times - Palestinian Refugee Masculinities in Lebanon

Challenging a traditional definition of masculinity,

The Best of Hard Times – Palestinian Refugee Masculinities in Lebanon explores two generations of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.

info@gustavo-barbosa.com

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