Racing Thoughts

“[…] the acceptance of marital rape has little to do with “Lebanese” or “Arab” culture, and it cannot solely be blamed on the supposed backwardness of religious authorities. It cannot be attributed to some inherent darkness within Islam, as it so often is. In fact feminists across the world, from all different religions (in addition to atheists) and “cultures,” have fought the same battle and have heard the same arguments lobbed against them from civil, military, religious, and “traditional” authorities. In Lebanon, it is particularly obscene to single out the Mufti or the religious courts more generally for perpetuating sexism and patriarchy because women are considered the legal appendages of men in all areas of law and society. It is just too easy, and too convenient to think that the only obstacle to legal equality is religion, particularly when the constitutive exception in Lebanese law is a nationality law that holds that only children of Lebanese citizens who have a penis are worthy enough be Lebanese citizens. And by the way, if the infant has a vagina she automatically loses this entitlement. The argument cited to continue this discrimination is invariably the oh-so-sacred “sectarian balance” in the country. And yet when one plays devils advocate and says “ok, so men who are married to ‘foreigners’ should not be able to give their citizenship to their spouses or children either” one is met with blank stares, as if the thought never occurred to them. And I am sure that in many cases it hasn’t, because all of these interconnected legal exceptions-from rape laws to nationality laws to marriage and divorce laws to inheritance laws to banking laws and to census registry laws- all of these together produce what it means to be a Lebanese woman today. And as a Lebanese woman, my enemy is not the religions authorities, or the civil state, or the criminal justice system. Rather, my enemy is the logic unites all these authorities together and makes them (sometimes uneasy) allies: the logic of privilege, ownership, entitlement, and a discriminatory weighting of gendered lives. […]”

- Excerpt from the article “Sexual Violence Is A Crime, Sometimes” by Maya Mikdashi, posted on January 11, 2012 on Jadaliyya

“[…] much of the evidence seems to come from the idea that all Lebanese women walk around wearing short skirts, going to the beach in bikinis, and clubbing until the morning. Within this conception of women’s rights, then, it is the fact that Lebanese women’s bodies are exposed that is the greatest factor for whether they are free or not.

This misogynistic conceptualization of women’s freedom can be traced back to colonial representations of veiled women as oppressed that persist till this day (a topic addressed at length by scholar Leila Ahmed in her work Women and Gender in Islam). Within the colonial framework, Arab women’s status is a determinant of Arab societies’ progress, and the European colonizer’s ability to see the Arab woman’s body is a key measure of this progress. These superficial standards of women’s rights and freedoms continues, and it is no wonder that peddlers of “pseudosexual liberation” like Joumana Haddad (as Angie Nassar brilliantly refers to her) receive acclaim while women’s rights activists are often left out in the dark. […]”

- Excerpt from the article “Not Just Decor: The Struggle for Real Women’s Rights in Lebanon” by Alex Shams, posted on January 10, 2012 on KABOBfest 

Intersectionality is a sociological theory suggesting that—and seeking to examine how—various socially and culturally constructed categories of discrimination interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels, contributing to systematic social inequality. 

Intersectionality holds that the classical models of oppression within society, such as those based on race/ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, class, disability, or species do not act independently of one another; instead, these forms of oppression interrelate creating a system of oppression that reflects the “intersection” of multiple forms of discrimination.*

*Knudsen, Susanne. “Intersectionality—A Theoretical Inspiration in the Analysis of Minority Cultures and Identities in Textbooks.” Caught in the Web or Lost in the Textbook 2006 61–76. 26 Nov 2007