Sextarianism : Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon / Maya Mikdashi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mikdashi, Maya, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cultural pluralism--Political aspects--Lebanon.

Cultural pluralism.

Power (Social sciences)--Lebanon.

Power (Social sciences).

Religion and state--Lebanon.

Religion and state.

Secularism--Lebanon.

Secularism.

Sex--Political aspects--Lebanon.

Sex.

Lebanon--Ethnic relations.

Lebanon.

Lebanon--Politics and government--1990-.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (190 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Introduction. Sextarianism

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

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

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

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

Chapter 5 The Epidermal State: Violence and the Materiality of Power

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781503631564

1503631567

OCLC:

1281787187