1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910862084603321

Autore

Mikdashi Maya

Titolo

Sextarianism : sovereignty, secularism, and the state in Lebanon / / Maya Mikdashi

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Stanford, California : , : Stanford University Press, , [2022]

ISBN

9781503631564

1-5036-3156-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (190 pages)

Disciplina

956.92045

Soggetti

Power (Social sciences) - Lebanon

Religion and state - Lebanon

Secularism - Lebanon

Sex - Political aspects - Lebanon

Cultural pluralism - Political aspects - Lebanon

HISTORY / Middle East / General

Lebanon Politics and government 1990-

Lebanon Ethnic relations

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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

Sommario/riassunto

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.