Sextarianism

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.

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

"One issue that is often encountered when studying Middle Eastern realities is the pervasive feeling of exceptionability that scholars, journalists, and agents of knowledge production, in general, tend to ascribe to this region.... Maya Mikdashi challenges this view and approaches Lebanon as a site of intensification rather than exceptionalism. To her, studying the Lebanese sectarian system is the key to learning more about secular power and how it is practiced through the intersection of religion, sect, and sex."—Sibilla Gosso, Journal of Church & State

"Sextarianism is a unique scholarly work of such intellectual rigor that it ought to be mandatory reading for scholars and students of the Middle East, anthropology, law, political science, and sociology. The book gives a new perspective on sex, sect and, the state in Lebanon—but its findings can also be applied to understanding other sextarian states such as Iraq. Sextarianism opens up a fascinating new way of understanding the intersections of sect, sex, and sexuality in relation to freedom, abuses of power, citizenship, and the state."—Evin Ismail, Conflict and Society

"Using court records, Mikdashi... disentangles the ways in which the sectarian Lebanese state handles sexual difference through the application of personal status laws....Recommended."—M. L. Russell, CHOICE

"Both theoretically sophisticated and deeply poignant, Sextarianism disrupts assumptions that secularism liberates people from religion, challenging idealized solutions to political-sectarianism. Readers are gifted with marvelously vivid and careful ethnography, through which Maya Mikdashi brings to life the often-painful effects of state sectarian practices on people's lives in Lebanon."—Lara Deeb, Scripps College

"A tour de force by one of the most dynamic, iconoclastic, and original socio-political analysts of the Arab world of this generation. Maya Mikdashi's Sextarianism will transform the way Lebanon has been understood; more radically, it will force everyone to rethink how religious and sexual differences work at/as the nexus of states and citizenship."—Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University

"Sextarianism is luminous. Maya Mikdashi brings panache and an exquisite eye for the quotidian to diverse objects of analysis, all while prying open new conversations about archival research as collective labor. A must-read for anyone studying state formation, the geopolitics of queer theory, and secularism, with implications far beyond Lebanon."—Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University

"Maya Mikdashi's gloriously written Sextarianism is the book we have been waiting for. Deeply personal in its tone, expansively political in its intent, this book draws on unusual archives and intimate knowledge of Lebanon to show the relation between gender, sexuality, and the state in all its ambivalent, messy complexity."—Laleh Khalili, University of London