Suad Joseph

The Public/Private — The Imagined Boundary in the Imagined Nation/State/Community: The Lebanese case

The nation/state as an imaginative enterprise encompasses multiple imagined subnational boundaries. The ‘public/private’, I suggest, is a ‘purposeful fiction’ constitutive of the will to statehood. As such, its configurations are impacted upon by the institutions and forces competing with and within state-building enterprises. Proposing the terms government, non-government and domestic as analytical tools to demarcate discursive and material domains, I argue that, in Lebanon, the fluidity of boundaries among these spheres is constitutive of patriarchal connectivity, a form of patriarchal kinship linked to the state-building enterprise.

Patriarchy and development in the Arab world.

The author defines patriarchy in the Arab context as the prioritizing of the rights of males and elders, and the justification of those rights within kinship values which are usually supported by religion. She considers the systematic impact of patriarchy throughout Arab society in the attempt to understand the persistence of patriarchy in the Arab world. Patriarchy in the Arab world, and other regions, is an obstacle for women, children, families, and states. It affects health, education, labor, human rights, and democracy. The author argues that patriarchy is powerful in the Arab world because age-based kinship values and relationships are crucial socially, economically, politically, ideologically, and psychologically. Sections discuss social patriarchy, economic patriarchy, political patriarchy, religious patriarchy, patriarchy in the self, and development planners, practitioners, and patriarchy.

Elite Strategies for State-Building: Women, Family, Religion and State in Iraq and Lebanon

Investigation of the relationships among women, families, religions and states in the Middle East has been stimulated in part by the problematisation of the concepts of ‘women’,2 ‘the family’,3 ‘religion’,4 and ‘the state’5 in political sociology, anthropology and feminist scholarship. The rethinking of these concepts has produced a body of case studies mainly focused on individual countries and with a contemporary emphasis. This has been a necessary process for building the empirical foundations for comparative and theoretical endeavours.

Descent of the nation: Kinship and citizenship in Lebanon

The mechanisms which underpin kinship are mobilized by states to organize the citizenry for state‐building, often transporting patriarchy and (reinscribing it in public arenas. While the gendering and aging of citizenship is predictable in the deployment of patriarchal kin institutions for state‐building, the focus of this paper is less on these outcomes (well theorized elsewhere) and more on a mechanism undertheorized in feminist analyses of patriarchy and state dynamics—patrilineality. Patrilineality is commonly subsumed in feminist analyses of patriarchy, particularly in the study of the Middle East. Understood as kinship descent through the fathers lineage, patrilineality is often conflated with patriarchy in societies in which both are present, resulting in the essentialization of patriarchy and a glossing of critical cultural differences in the gendering and aging of citizenship. While kinship in Lebanon has been fluid and Lebanese have mobilized both patrilineal and matrilineal principles of kinsh...

Teaching Rights and Responsibilities: Paradoxes of Globalization and Children's Citizenship in Lebanon

Efforts to promote a more individualistic model of childhood, pressed on Leba- non from a variety of outside sources including the United Nations, have affected parents and children in Lebanon. At the same time, however, a more collective, family-centered identity continues to have great force. This essay, based on inquiries in two different local settings, discusses the resultant tensions and combinations over recent decades.

Political Familism in Lebanon

Patrimonialism has been used to explain the “backwardness” of Middle Eastern states, their “lacks.” Patrimonialism, however, may undermine its own insights by creating false binaries and false histories. The author suggests family/families as a point of departure and political familism as a conceptual step toward reframing analysis of state/citizen relationships in Lebanon. Political familism refers to the deployment of family institutions, ideologies, idioms (idiomatic kinship), practices, and relationships by citizens to activate their demands in relation to the state and by state actors to mobilize practical and moral grounds for governance based on a civic myth of kinship and public discourse that privileges family. Political familism addresses the processes by which states and citizens mutually constitute a set of public practices that reproduce the privileged position of “family,” even as specific family relations and practices diverge from discursive presumptions.

Pensée 2: Sectarianism as Imagined Sociological Concept and as Imagined Social Formation

In 1978 Barbara Pillsbury and I dedicated our coedited book, Muslim–Christian Conflicts: Economic, Political and Social Origins (Westview), with these words: “To those who struggle to demystify religion and to those who suffer and die because the struggle is yet unfinished.” Charles Issawi observes in his preface that the contributors to the volume tend to interpret the conflicts more in economic and political terms than in “religious” terms. In an effort to develop analytical tools, my introduction distinguishes between “religion/religious identity and consciousness” (as theology/theological consciousness) and “sect/sectarianism” (as social organization, relationships, dynamics/group identity, and consciousness). I argue that sectarianism is about how “differences” are constructed; because people can believe they are very different when they are not, the task of the scholar is to describe what differences do exist, how they emerged, and why people believe they are different. Differentiation is a process, I suggest, that operates through the everyday—through socialization, through family systems, and through various other aspects of social organization in both systematic and erratic or contradictory ways.

miriam cooke: A Pioneer of Middle East Women's Studies

Imet miriam cooke sometime in the early 1980s, probably at an annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). She had finished her PhD in 1980 at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, just five years after I had finished my PhDatColumbiaUniversity. I bumped into this brilliant and articulatewomanwith a British accent everywhere I went. I remember asking the Lebanese poet, essayist, and artist Etel Adnan, now a mutual friend, “Who is this person?” Etel shook her head and said, “I don’t know, but she is everywhere I go!” I said, “Aha, so she is everywhere!” Thiswas in thedayswhen conspiratorial stories about theMiddleEast proliferated. My encounters with miriam were always engaging and collegial. I left our conversations thinking deeply about whatever we had discussed and remembered them. But she did this odd thing of using all lowercase letters for her name. At oneMESAmeeting in the 1980s, my good friend Barbara Aswad told me that another colleague had asked Barbara about me—“Who is she? Why is she everywhere?” “Hmmm,” I thought. “This must be because people are suspicious of successful women.” I could not predict in those early days that miriam cooke would become one of the people I most trust and respect. I worked most closely with her and a few others to strengthen the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS), launch the Journal for Middle East Women’s Studies, and develop the field of Middle East feminist studies. AMEWS was born out of angst. The Civil War in Lebanon broke out in 1975, the same year I completedmy PhD (in which I had predicted the falling apart of the Lebanese political system). The hell that theMiddle East had become was reflected

Chaos as a Political Strategy of Governance

T he Trump administration is governing with a tactic often used by authoritarian regimes and now employed in new and extreme forms with the help of social media—the tactic of chaos. Banning travelers from seven (later six) Muslim majority countries, accusing the Obama administration of wiretapping Trump Tower during the election, denying reports of Russian contacts, building a wall, rounding up “illegal” immigrants, collecting the names of staff known to champion environmentalism and gender equality in the Department of Energy and the Department of State—these and many other stories, statements, and tweets are frequently reported in themedia as examples of the “ineptness”of theTrumpadministration. There is another way to think about what we are witnessing: chaos as a mechanism of governance. Theuse of chaos is not always accidental but canbe ameans of rule andcontrol that presents a grave danger to democracy. It is not a new tactic. It has been used by fascist, authoritarian regimes, military and nonmilitary dictators, union-busting employers and reality-TV show hosts. Although chaos is not alien to American politics, what is new, perhaps, is the unabashed promotion of it as a daily means of governance by elected government leaders. It is so brazen as to defy belief. Yet it is a form of governance—a form of governance that conceals or makes acceptable arbitrary, exploitative, and repressive measures that install new forms of “order.” Such order allows new forms of surveillance while pointing the fake finger of surveillance at others, intensifying tax inequality while bathing in inflated market euphoria, derailing voter rights while claiming voter fraud, undoing environmental protections while boasting of “new jobs,” firing up Islamophobia (with such tactics

Medicines of the Soul: Female Bodies and Sacred Geographies in a Transnational Islam@@@Woman and Power in the Middle East

In Medicines of the Soul, the autobiographical writings of three leading women in todays Islamic revival movement reveal dramatic stories of religious transformation. As interpreted by Fedwa Malti-Douglas, the autobiographies provide a powerful, groundbreaking portrayal of gender, religion, and discourses of the body in Arabo-Islamic culture. At the center of each story is a lively female Islamic spirituality that questions secular hierarchies while reaffirming patriarchal ones.