Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon - Softcover

Mikdashi, Maya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1503631559 ISBN 13: 9781503631557

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2022

Synopsis

The Lebanese state is structured through religious freedom and secular power sharing across sectarian groups. Every sect has specific laws that govern kinship matters like marriage or inheritance. Together with criminal and civil laws, these laws regulate and produce political difference. But whether women or men, Muslims or Christians, queer or straight, all people in Lebanon have one thing in common―they are biopolitical subjects forged through bureaucratic, ideological, and legal techniques of the state.

With this book, Maya Mikdashi offers a new way to understand state power, theorizing how sex, sexuality, and sect shape and are shaped by law, secularism, and sovereignty. Drawing on court archives, public records, and ethnography of the Court of Cassation, the highest civil court in Lebanon, Mikdashi shows how political difference is entangled with religious, secular, and sexual difference. She presents state power as inevitably contingent, like the practices of everyday life it engenders, focusing on the regulation of religious conversion, the curation of legal archives, state and parastatal violence, and secular activism. Sextarianism locates state power in the experiences, transitions, uprisings, and violence that people in the Middle East continue to live.

About this title

About the Author

Maya Mikdashi is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and a Lecturer in the Middle East Studies Program at Rutgers University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1503631559
• ISBN 13: 9781503631557
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288