Maya Mikdashi, "Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon" (Stanford UP, 2022)
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\u2014they are biopolitical subjects forged through bureaucratic, ideological, and legal techniques of the state.\nWith 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.\xa0Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon\xa0(Stanford UP, 2022)\xa0locates state power in the experiences, transitions, uprisings, and violence that people in the Middle East continue to live.\nMaya Mikdashi is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and a Lecturer in the Middle East Studies Program at Rutgers University.\nAlize Ar\u0131can\xa0is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in\xa0Current Anthropology,\xa0City & Society,\xa0JOTSA,\xa0Radical Housing Journal, and\xa0entanglements. You can find her on Twitter\xa0@alizearican\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law