'queering' Debt: Relational Economies and Resistance in Lebanon's Financial Collapse

This research interrogates the lived experiences of Lebanon’s LGBTQ+ community amid the nation’s financial collapse, putting forth “Queer debt” as a conceptual framework that reconceptualizes debt as a form of relational labor rather than a mere economic obligation. "Queer debt" encapsulates how Queer individuals and networks mobilize in response to economic crises through informal, community-driven systems of care, subverting normative conceptions of debt as solely a financial liability. By synthesizing relational economic sociology with queer Marxist thought, this study critically examines how these networks of mutual aid resist and reconfigure hegemonic political-economic structures, generating alternative solidarities and modes of resistance. It demonstrates how financial relationships are inextricably bound to gendered, racialized, and queer lived realities, emphasizing the ways in which marginalized communities experience, navigate, and resist financial collapse.

Drawing on qualitative interviews and a survey of 87 LGBTQ+ individuals, the research uncovers how queer communities in Lebanon respond to economic precarity not through traditional financial instruments, but through relational practices that destabilize capitalist logics. By illustrating the subversive potential of “Queer debt” as a form of survival and resistance, the research offers critical insights into how marginalized groups cultivate new pathways for enduring and reimagining economic collapse, or "the economy" more expansively.