Bargaining with Patrilineality Women’s Struggles within the Lebanese Sextarian & Repro-Normative Legal & Bureaucratic Structure

Abstract

The Lebanese legal and bureaucratic state apparatus maintains the status quo along two intersecting legislations: the nationality law & personal status laws. They enshrine the state’s patriarchal sextarian apparatus, that manages citizenship by regulating sexual and sectarian difference, and repro-normative framework by legally encouraging certain individuals to reproduce while discouraging others who do not fit the state’s perspective of an ideal citizenry. These laws enforce patriarchal parental rights and roles: voluntary fatherhood and provisional motherhood. Male registered citizens are entitled legally and socially to opt out of their parental role to their convenience or withdraw the rights from female registered citizens during divorce settlements, with little to no social repercussions. On the other hand, maternal rights are provisional: women may have to take on all the parental responsibility if faced with the father’s unwillingness to recognize the child or to parent. Moreover, women barred from extending their citizenship rights to their non-Lebanese spouse and children must undertake strenuous administrative procedures to regularly legalize their nuclear family unit in Lebanon. How do women bargain within the Lebanese repro-normative patriarchal system oppressing along intersecting sectarian, sexed, national identity, class, and racial lines?

Drawing on short topical life-stories interviews with six women with high educational attainment who have been confronted with one or multiple legal discriminatory practices, this research highlights their bargaining trajectories within a repro-normative patriarchal system that oppresses along, inter alia, intersecting sectarian, sexed, national identity, class, and racial lines.

Based on the life stories and oral testimonies of women affected by these systems of domination and enshrined in the theoretical frameworks of sextarianism and repro-normativity, this research aims at highlighting how interviewees mobilize material and immaterial resources to navigate the system: kin and/or professional networks, hours of unpaid labor to understand the bureaucratic maze or avoid any legal recourse and rely on amicable agreement. Those who are privileged with a stable and cooperative family have the time and resources to engage in activism to bring some change to this discriminatory legislation. The tight bond between citizenship and maternal rights forces women who fall at the intersection of the nationality law and personal status laws to justify their worthiness as citizens of the country as well as demonstrate their motherhood skills.