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Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon

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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.

ISBN-13: 9781503631557

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Publication Date: 06-07-2022

Pages: 288

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

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

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Introduction. Sextarianism 1

1 Afterlives of a Census: Rethinking State Power and Political Difference 24

2 A Fire in the Archive: History, Ethnography, Multiplicity 48

3 Regulating Conversion: Sovereignty, Bureaucracy, and the Banality of Religion 83

4 Are You Going to Pride? Evangelical Secularism and the Politics of Law 117

4 The Epidermal State: Violence and the Materiality of Power 153

Epilogue 183

Acknowledgments 193

Notes 197

Bibliography 231

Index 251