Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon by Maya Mikdashi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022)

Reviewed by Sami Hermez, Northwestern University in Qatar

As a man with Lebanese citizenship passed down to me from my father, I don’t ever recall feeling the law as gendered. Sure, it was sectarian but it was non-gendered in my mind. I considered my place in the system through my sect but never through my legal sex identification. I had heard what women went through when it came to marrying a foreigner, for example, and losing the right to pass on citizenship to their children, or the problems that arise due to inheritance, and other legal challenges women have to live with for being women, but these issues were distant from me and I was blind to the gendered ways the law pressed on me. Maya Mikdashi’s (2022) monograph, Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon, forces us all to see citizenship in a different light. Sextarianism spins together a wonderful analysis of the way our legal sex and sect identifications are entangled, and how the categories co-constitute each other, as well as our subjectivity and our relationship with the state. Her contribution is in moving beyond sect as a historical and/or political community to see it as a biopolitical category based on a regime of sexual difference (101). To see the Lebanese state as only sectarian misses the full story of how sex and sexuality play a fundamental role in maintaining the power of and the relationship between sects. Mikdashi coins the term “sextarianism” to describe this secular Lebanese system that governs the lives of people in Lebanon.

In Sextarianism, Mikdashi is offering a new and breakthrough approach to the way “sex, sexuality, and sect structure legal bureaucratic systems, as well as how citizenship and statecraft are performed” at the intersection between sex and sect (2). Mikdashi does not just offer us a new way of thinking of sectarianism, but also of how to reconceptualize secularism and sovereignty through religious and sexual difference. Sovereignty, thus, “is amplified by crossing, delineating, nesting, securitizing, and rupturing the so-called public and private spheres” (8), spheres where religion, sex, and sexuality are otherwise blurred.

The text is at once historical and anthropological in that Mikdashi is able to carve out an ethnographic reading of the archive, presenting her archival work in ways that weave together her fieldwork with people experiencing and confronting the sextarian system. For example, in chapter 2, she offers us a fascinating discussion of the archive, reflecting on the different ways one could study it and complicating how one would do so ethnographically. This work finds her deep in the archives of court systems, and she calls on us to think of the archive not just as a container of documents, but as a physical and lived space. The archive does not exist, she says, “without an archivist sharing a file or a document with a researcher, whether by delicately holding a case file about custody or throwing a war crimes file on the floor” (67). This chapter has great importance for anyone working with documents and trying to think about the lives and afterlives of documents.

In the introduction, Mikdashi discusses the work of the 1932 census, it’s world-making power, and how people threw the founding of the Lebanese state into disarray by the “lies [they] may have told. The lies that became bureaucracy. The lies that became law” (15). We often do not get accounts of the workings of the census and the way it impacted the lives of subjects decades later, as the state was formed on the basis of the knowledge it contained. Mikdashi draws on this bureaucratic historical event that has a deep and enduring impact on the citizen’s present-day relation to the state. In Chapter 1, the census regime emerges as a key node on which any present-day political change would need to account for. Mikdashi tells us that, “Census registries are an integral biopolitical technology of the modern state…[they] individualize citizens and produce the citizenry as a unitary population and as a group of populations (sectarian, regional, sexed)” (p. 29). Through a number of examples, she provides a compelling argument of how the category of the sect in Lebanon is structurally held together by the maintenance of sexual difference.

In Chapter 3, Mikdashi delves further into the bureaucratic nature of sextarianism through conversion cases that stem from marriages and divorces. Here, we get a more vivid image of the way the sextarian system operates in Lebanon and the complex and “nested” sovereignty that exists. Mikdashi successfully navigates state and personal status courts to uncover how they work in the private and public spheres. She argues that personal status courts, ultimately, “do not claim sovereignty over sectarian difference but over laws that govern sexual difference within different communities, over sextarian difference” (98), that difference that wraps and bounds sex with sect.

Chapter 4 introduces the notion of evangelical secularism and traces the way people were trying to promote a secular culture before any political change and doing so through a form that so closely resembled evangelism (p. 126). This evangelical secularism had an “aspirational discourse” (p. 127) and a temporality constantly focused on a seemingly impossible future. While Mikdashi does not explicitly state it, she brings queer theory to our understanding of sectarianism in the way she formulates the individual’s interior/exterior relation with the state. This at once has implications for how we understand our sect-based relation to the state but also for how to rethink the state’s relationship to gender and sexuality, and indeed the whole structure of categorization on such basis. Through her careful use of language, Mikdashi raises the possibility that one could be culturally male but legally non-gendered, just as Lebanese are fighting to be legally non-sectarian but still be allowed to practice their sect culturally or spiritually.

Chapter 5 is especially powerful in thinking about the state anew, and introduces the concept of the epidermal state, “a state that performs its sovereignty by materializing the sextarian stakes of bodies and sexualities through securitization, violence, and law” (20). The sextarian epidermal state is a state governed at the intersection of sex and sect, and materializing its sovereignty as it, literally and figuratively, gets under our skin. Mikdashi walks us through cases of hyman and anal exams that are used to determine divorces and punishments for “unnatural” sex. But there are other ways the state is epidermal, for example, in the way authorities can make claims about a person’s sexuality through the tattoos they have, and then relating to them as delinquents on that basis. The epidermal state uses our bodies as evidence, and conducts tests in order to determine our place in law and vis-à-vis the state.

Overall, this monograph is beautifully written and should be essential reading for graduate students studying sectarianism, secularism, and sovereignty, as well as studies of gender and sexuality. The book is important reading for historians, anthropologists, and legal scholars. It can help us to think of the role of sex and sexual difference in the making of the citizen beyond Lebanon and the Arab world.