Maya Mikdashi

Rutgers University

2023 Fatema Mernissi Book Award Winner

Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon

Stanford University Press 

Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism and the State in Lebanon uses a detailed study of Lebanon—a state best known for its absence from the lives of its citizens—to theorize the centrality of sex and sexuality and sect to law, secularism, and state power in general. In well-written prose, Mikdashi forcefully and convincingly demonstrates how sex and sect are mutually constitutive in bureaucracy, law, and ideology. The book is also remarkable for its innovative and effective use of a range of sources, including court archives, bureaucratic records and ethnography and a judiciously self-reflexive analysis, as well as for the breadth of the practices and conditions it explores, including religious conversion, knowledge production, social movements, and state violence. 

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