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E-book
Author Mikdashi, Maya, author

Title Sextarianism : Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon / Maya Mikdashi
Published Redwood City : Stanford University Press, [2022]

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Description 1 online resource (xiii, 265 pages) : illustrations
Contents Afterlives of a census : rethinking state power and political difference -- A fire in the archive : history, ethnography, multiplicity -- Regulating conversion : sovereignty, bureaucracy, and the banality of religion -- Are you going to pride? : evangelical secularism and the politics of law -- The epidermal state : violence and the materiality of power
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"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-250) and index
Notes Description based upon print version of record
Subject Power (Social sciences) -- Lebanon
Religion and state -- Lebanon
Secularism -- Lebanon
Sex -- Political aspects -- Lebanon
Cultural pluralism -- Political aspects -- Lebanon
SUBJECT Lebanon -- Politics and government -- 1990- http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh98002763
Lebanon -- Ethnic relations
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781503631564
1503631567