Death Becomes Him: The Hypervisibility of Martyrdom and Invisibility of the Wounded in the Iconography of Lebanese Militarised Masculinities1

Abstract

The visual landscape of Lebanon both mirrors and reasserts the country’s complex socio-political, economic and gendered order. Using public memorialisations of the dead in the Lebanese and Syrian Civil Wars as a starting point, the chapter analyses how these reflect Lebanese realities and imaginaries, and how particular militarised masculinities are constructed through them. The chapter then contrasts these visualisations with the invisibilisation of conflict-related disabilities and the war-wounded and what these mean for the reproduction of gendered and other social hierarchies.