‘The L in HELEM is for Lebanese’: Queering Nationality and Ethnicizing Queerness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper contributes to the debate on the appearance of LGBTQ+ organizations in the Middle East in the beginning of the twenty-first century, through the analysis of the diasporization of HELEM, the MENA region’s first LGBTQ+ organization, founded in 2001 in Beirut. By looking at the effort to internationalize HELEM to Canada, France, Australia and the USA, it addresses the under-researched intersection of queer migrations and LGBTQ+ activism, bridging queer and area studies. Acting as a diasporic mediator between Canada and the Middle East, HELEM Montreal started with the formal goals of fundraising and attracting visibility to its Beirut counterpart. More recently, it has been shifting to benefit from Canada’s federal scheme of refugees’ resettlement private sponsorship, seeking to fund the resettlement of queer refugees from the Middle East. This paper also reflects on the challenge posed to LGBTQ+ Arab activists in guaranteeing that queer asylum claims are credible as authentic without reproducing Orientalist tropes that dehumanise heterosexual Arab men. Asylum systems operate as regimes of truth that require certain narratives and performances on the basis of gender identity and sexuality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".