The Politics of Gendered Violence in Lebanon

[Protest in Beirut against violence against women. Image by Joelle Hatem] [Protest in Beirut against violence against women. Image by Joelle Hatem]

The Politics of Gendered Violence in Lebanon

By : Maya Mikdashi

Ali al Zein murdered his wife Sara Al-Amin on 18 May 2015. Her murder was shocking in its brutality. It is only one link in a long chain of visible and invisible violence against women in contemporary Lebanon. Structural conditions give birth to this violence. These conditions enshrine the legal impunity and social acceptability of female vulnerability to violence.

Amin’s murder is an instance of intimate partner violence, the latest in a spate of wife killing across Lebanon. In addition to highlighting, yet again, the urgent need for sweeping legal change, this crime should shake people in Lebanon to the core. Here was a woman who was subject to her husband’s physical and emotional abuse for twenty years before she threatened to take him to court under Lebanon’s new family violence law. On returning to the family home after a promise of safety, her husband killed her with seventeen bullets from an AK 47. The couple’s children witnessed the murder.

The presence of the AK 47, and the ease of access to it, points to an intersection between Lebanon’s history of war and the violence that marks public and intimate spheres. This violence is political. It is about the struggle over as well as the maintenance and regulation of power and resources within ideological frameworks—in this case sex and sectarian based patriarchal nationalism.  

However, the discourse on political violence in Lebanon has focused on sectarian violence to the exclusion of its multiple other forms and manifestations. Like sectarian violence, violence against women emerges from a complex knot of legal, historical, social, and economic factors. Patriarchal sexism is just as foundational to Lebanese law as political sectarianism. In Lebanese law, sex defines the rights and duties of citizens to a much larger extent than sect does. There is no area of law that does not distinguish between men and women to the benefit of men.  Criminal codes distinguish between the rape of a stranger and of a wife. These codes afford leniency to crimes against women under the rubric of “honor.” Civil laws and institutions register female citizens as legal appendages of their fathers or husbands. Nationality laws and procedures ensure that women cannot pass citizenship to spouses and children. Personal status laws–all fifteen of them—distinguish between the rights and duties of male and female identified persons.

Given how constitutive sexual difference and masculinist supremacy are to Lebanese law, the passage of a family violence law almost a year ago was a watershed event. Yet, precisely because the logic that produces this weighted sexual difference is everywhere, legal reform is not enough. Imagine, for example, laws that make sectarian killings a “hate crime” in a sectarian political and legal system. Such a law might make killing a Maronite because he is a Maronite a crime, but it would do nothing to address how material and legal conditions produced this person as a “Maronite” to begin with.  A law criminalizing individual sectarian violence would do little to stem sectarianism in a country built on a sectarian logic. Indeed sectarian violence is never a lonely act. Like gendered violence, it is a systemic and ever present-possibility.

Indeed, the fact that sectarianism and sex work together to produce Lebanese citizenship facilitates gendered violence. To remove the “gender bargain” from Lebanese citizenship as an entire edifice of rights, laws, and duties necessitates an overhaul of criminal, civil, personal status, procedural, and nationality laws. The aim would be to move from a legal and political system that grants gendered violence legal impunity to a system where the gender of a citizen or resident does not determining their legal rights. A solitary family violence law, appended onto a legal system that produces sex as a primary marker of difference, is simply not enough. Until Lebanese state structures stop reflecting, codifying, producing and amplifying the vulnerability of women in intimate, economic, and public spheres, laws such as the domestic violence law can only be band aids that cover only the most obvious of scars. Moreover, the current law itself does not go far enough. Due to the interventions of religious and patriarchal leaders, the law does not criminalize marital rape. It also does not protect domestic workers, women who live and work with Lebanese families and are integral to  those domiciles.

Vulnerability and Intersectionality 

Feminists and anti-racist intellectuals, activists, and policy shapers have documented and elaborated on how formal and informal conditions intersect to produce violence and precarity. In Lebanon sex, sect, class, gender and race together make female identified people vulnerable to violence.  An intersectional approach allows us to understand how different women are subject to different forms and intensifications of violence, and how it is that that some women engage in violence against (other) women .

Lebanese cis women are not the only ones subjected to gendered violence. A recent study has shown how trans women are vulnerable to violence within state institutions as well as daily life.  Law, pervasive homophobia, and a masculinist ideology that violently polices a rigid gender regime sanctions this form of violence.

Female identified refugees are also vulnerable to gendered violence. Over two million Syrian, Palestinian, Iraqi, Sudanese, and Kurdish refugees currently live in Lebanon in formal and informal settlements and refugee camps. Syrian refugee families are majority female led and most of them live in poverty and precarious forms of legality and illegality. Women and girls are more vulnerable to sexual and physical violence due to these structural conditions of poverty and illegality. The Lebanese government has banned Syrian refugees from working in a number of professions, and has imposed a new draconian visa system. For those Syrians who cannot prove they are “tourists,” the Ministries of the Interior and of Labor have instituted a quasi kafala system that ties refuges to Lebanese employers. This regime takes its cue from the unjust structure that governs domestic laborers. Our thinking on violence against women should be expansive enough to account for how all women (cis and trans, citizen, resident, laborer and refugee) are vulnerable to violence.

Such an expansive approach would address how legal regimes and institutional relationships produce and facilitate poverty, precarity, and exploitation. For example, migrant laborers—usually African or South or East Asian— who work as domestic servants in Lebanese homes are vulnerable to violence in ways that the woman employing her is not, even if that female employer is also vulnerable to violence within and outside the home. Almost every day there is a report of domestic servants who are abused, who have fled, who have committed or attempted suicide, or who have sought protection. These reports are snapshots of the violence that these women are subjected to in their residences (their places of work). In many ways the very presence of racialized and economically precarious domestic laborers in Lebanon is predicated on a condition of violence. Intermediaries bring women from Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, the Phillipines, Korea (and more) and lie to them about the working conditions they will face. Once employed as domestic labor, these women are not in control of their movement, and they are not in possession of their travel documents or official ids. They are paid less (often times much less) than the official minimum wage (450 US dollars a month). They are often degraded, and are subject to inhumane working and living conditions. In addition to these quotidian conditions of violence, there are “bad employers” who physically and sexually abuse them, withhold their wages or food, starve them, lock them in their apartments, and house them on balconies or in pantries or on the kitchen floor. 

The Lebanese family violence law of 2014 does not protect domestic laborers. It does not even recognize these women as subjects of law or as residents of a domicile. To date, Lebanese citizens have not sustained a focused or popular campaign that addresses the working conditions, human rights, or bodily integrity of domestic laborers. However, in an unprecedented, brave, and historic effort, migrant domestic laborers have begun organizing politically. In 2014 a small group tried to register a labor union with the Lebanese Ministry of Labor, which promptly declared the initiative illegal and “unnecessary.”

The state has thus far not effectively intervened in the working and living conditions of domestic labor and does not ensure that laborers remain in possession of their travel documents. These conditions are similar to those that govern another group of trafficked women in Lebanon: women who work in cabarets or super nightclubs. These women, most often citizens of Eastern European countries, have no access to mobility or their travel documents. They come to Lebanon under false contracts and are often coerced into sex work. Domestic laborers and cabaret workers have another thing in common: they are subject to the Lebanese General Security Directorate. This state institution issues work visas, and regulates the almost 250,000 domestic laborers and hundreds of Eastern European cabaret workers living and working in Lebanon. In fact, the Lebanese General Security Directorate (GSD) issues a special category of “artist visas” to cabaret workers. It is thus directly implicated in these women’s conditions, conditions that engender violence structurally.

Beyond Violence, Towards Emancipation

Female identified persons form the majority of Lebanese citizens, and of the residents of Lebanon. This majority is legally, socially, and economically unequal to their male identified counterparts. 

On Saturday 30 May 2015, hundreds of people gathered in front of the National Museum to protest the pervasiveness of violence against women in Lebanon. The protest was a strong message to the public: violence against women is not a “personal issue” and it will no longer be tolerated. The protestors insisted that violence against women is a pressing political and social issue.

What ties the vicious murder of Sara al-Amin to a trans woman harassed in a police station or a domestic laborer who is living in a small windowless room full of toxic materials? What does marital rape, the legal, physical and economic precarity of Syrian refugee women, and the vulnerability of trafficked cabaret workers have in common?

These are all instances of violence against women that Lebanese law sanctions and that the state and its institutions protects. A masculinist patriarchal culture, one that enshrines female inferiority, licenses these laws and procedures. Ending this sex based ideological infrastructure is a task as difficult, and as urgent, as ending sectarianism in Lebanon. 

Ending sectarianism is not just a matter of law. It requires legal, educational, religious, and cultural change. Similarly, ending sexual difference and the protection of gendered violence in Lebanese law will not end sexism, masculinism, or violence against women. We must demand short term solutions to crisis such as Sara al-Amin’s murder while never losing sight of our long term goal: gender equality among all male and female bodies in all areas of life and law.  As we struggle with legal, institutional, and state structures, we must never forget that it is these very forces that maintain masculinist ideology and in many cases, institutionalize gendered violence. The General Security Directorate, mentioned above, is the most obvious example of a Lebanese state institution that is actively invested in violence against women.

We are, and must continue to act towards a comprehensive overhaul of law and policy and towards ending the sex based masculinist ideology that gives form and sanctions law and policy. As Lebanese and non-Lebanese feminist activists in Lebanon have and continue to teach us, we must struggle on both of these fronts in order to breach the horizon of sexed emancipation.  

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Maya Mikdashi, Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

      Maya Mikdashi, Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

      A convergence of so many things, starting with a conversation in a grad school class about religious conversion in the Middle East. The consensus in class was that this was considered apostasy, and not only illegal but dangerous in most of the region.

    • ألا يكون الرَّجل الفِلسطيني ضحيّة؟ جَندرة الحُروب الإسرائيلية على غزّة

      ألا يكون الرَّجل الفِلسطيني ضحيّة؟ جَندرة الحُروب الإسرائيلية على غزّة

      نصحو كل صباحٍ على تعداد قتلى جَديد: ذبحت آلة الحرب الإسرائيلية مئة أو مئتي أو أربعمئة أو ستمئة فلسطينيّ. تعكس الأرقام أعلاه عدة معلومات: أغلب أهل قطاع غزّة، أحد أعلى المناطق كثافة سكانية في العالم، لاجئون من فلسطين التاريخية.

    • Beyond the Lebanese Constitution: A Primer

      Beyond the Lebanese Constitution: A Primer

      All constitutions are flawed, even (or especially) those that are treated as particularly sacrosanct—such as the US Constitution. The recent protest movement in Lebanon, which began on 17 October 2019, has generated renewed interest in the Lebanese constitution—with a lot of what might be called “constitution talk” by both protestors and the political class. In this article, I focus on two issues that have renewed and stimulated much interest in the constitution: calls for (1) the removal of sectarian representation in parliament; and (2) a unified personal status law. I also offer a short history and ideological reading of the Lebanese constitution, stressing its contradictions. I end with a series of questions that push our political imagination beyond the constitution in its current form and toward a new social contract, one that actively responds to many of the protestors’ demands.

In the Shadow of Malala: The West’s Unsaved Others

Malala Yousafzai has made a number of headlines in the past few weeks: Nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, addressing the UN on the occasion of “Malala Day” dedicated to youth education, meeting with the Obamas in the Oval Office, chatting with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, speaking at the World Bank’s “International Day of the Girl,” and receiving the honorary Canadian citizenship. In case you missed it, even The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart declared his wish to adopt her.

Many have written about Malala’s fame. Journalist Assed Baig argued that Western journalists and politicians have used Malala to appease their white man’s burden, to hide their sins in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to divert attention from the Western-caused suffering of many in the region. In a recent piece on Al-Jazeera, Murtaza Hussain compared Malala to nine-year-old Pakistani girl Nabila Rehman who came to Washington D.C. to testify before Congress about the drone attack that killed her grandmother last year. Only five out of 430 representatives came to hear Nabila’s story. For Hussain, Malala Politicians and pundits used Malala as the human face of the American-led War on Terror, on behalf of whom “the United States and its allies can say they have been unleashing such incredible bloodshed.” Nabila, on the other hand, had become, “simply another one of the millions of nameless, faceless people who have had their lives destroyed over the past decade of American wars.”

By shedding light on the suffering, past and present, of people in the Middle East, such critical interventions expose Western political propaganda’s use of Malala. But who are Malala’s others? For she has many. And they are not just those in the Middle East, but in the heart of the West itself. Certainly, Malala’s near-canonization diverts attention from the chaos and injustice of the War on Terror in the region. But what about those black, brown, and white poor bodies, in the West, that remain in Malala’s shadow?

Malala rose to international fame following a failed assassination attempt by the Taliban on 9 October, 2012. Taliban gunmen shot her in the head and neck as she was returning home on a school bus in the Swat district of Pakistan. The attack received worldwide media coverage and prompted condemnations from President Obama, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and British Foreign Secretary William Hague. Days after the attack, Malala was flown to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham for surgery and rehabilitation. Former First Lady Laura Bush wrote a Washington Post op-ed comparing Malala to Holocaust diarist Anne Frank. Angelina Jolie donated 200,000 dollars to the Malala Fund. The young girl received the Simone De Beauvoir Award (previously given to Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Foreign Policy voted her among the top one hundred global thinkers in 2012. Time magazine listed Malala among the one hundred most influential people in the world in 2013. She had also made it to the magazine’s shortlist of Person of the Year in 2012. At sixteen, Malala has already published her first autobiography, I am Malala, and has her portrait commissioned for the National Gallery in London.

As the French magazine Le Point put it, Malala had become “an enterprise,” one that is run by the world’s largest independently owned public relations firm, Edelman. The multimillion dollar firm had allegedly dispatched five employees to assist Malala and her family, pro bono, in managing the media interest in her campaign. McKinsey, the renowned American global management consulting firm, is also involved in the campaign, handling the Malala Fund for the education of girls.

Of course, Malala is a modern-day heroine, and a great model to many. She was shot by the Taliban for speaking up against their ban on girls’ education, most famously in a 2009 series of blog posts commissioned by BBC’s Urdu service website. But Malala’s message of girls’ right to education cannot but be eclipsed by her larger-than-life persona that Western states, international organizations, public figures, and public relations firms have manufactured. This essay is not about Malala, the person, as much as it is about her international circulation as an icon. It is not about Malala’s deeds, unquestionably noble, but about Western politicians and media figures’ fascination with this young girl.

The history behind Western media narratives about Muslim women’s plight is by now all too familiar. As Lila Abu Lughod has shown, in the context of the post 9/11 War on Terror, Western political projects, including the United States War on Afghanistan, justify themselves by purporting to liberate and save women. Decades earlier, Frantz Fanon wrote about France’s project to colonize Algeria by unveiling/civilizing its women. Laura Bush’s unwavering commitment to brown women attests to the tenacity of the narrative. In fact, the former First Lady explicitly framed her Washington Post op-ed, “A Girl’s Courage Challenges Us to Act,” as a follow-up to her first presidential radio address. During that address in November 2001, Laura Bush justified the invasion of Afghanistan in the name of the liberation of its women, claiming that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” Bush ends her most recent op-ed with the following words: “Today, for Malala and the many girls like her, we need not and cannot wait. We must improve their world.” Plus ça change…Eleven years after the invasion of Afghanistan, Bush is still bent on saving Muslim women. Eleven years after asking her initial question, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” Abu Lughod is still trying to explain why, in fact, they do not.

Activists, artists, and intellectuals have repeatedly challenged everyone from Bush to the bare breasted women of FEMEN in their imperative to liberate Muslim women by speaking on their behalf. One recent example is thisbeautifully-executed Muslim superhero cartoon. Third world feminists have powerfully formulated these critiques for decades. But there is something peculiar about Malala that cannot be explained only by exposing the fetish of saving the brown woman. The critique must move further into the underbelly of this affective excess, to recuperate those other brown women that the “we” of Laura Bush does not want to save Otherwise, the analysis remains politically incomplete and critically lopsided, further reproducing the fixation on brown women “over there.” There is something about this sixteen-year-old amassing award after award and prize after prize that says much more about the West than it does about Malala, Pakistani girls, or the right to universal education.

This painful story “over here” is particularly poignant given the collapse of public education in the United States. The US president commends Malala on her “inspiring and passionate work on behalf of girls education in Pakistan" just as twelve-year-old Laporshia Massey died because the government did not find it necessary to pay a full-time nurse at her under-funded Philadelphia school. To be sure, no one will award Laporshia a Nobel Peace Prize. She is not Pakistani, not a Middle Eastern Muslim girl shot in the head by the Taliban. No one will send Laporshia a helicopter to fly her to a hospital. She is just a poor black girl from Philly. She suffocates quietly in her classroom. She is told “there’s no nurse, just be calm.” She is ordered to wait even as Laura Bush implores, “we need not and cannot wait. We must improve their world.” The world that must be saved is far away over there; ours is doing just fine. In his meeting with Malala, president Obama signed a proclamation to mark Friday as the “International Day of the Girl.” The proclamation reads: "on every continent, there are girls who will go on to change the world in ways we can only imagine, if only we allow them the freedom to dream." Young girls from American public high schools are pleading with their government to build schools, not prisons. They are dreaming out loud, but who is listening?

Muslim girls’ right to education must also be brought into relief in France, which bans Muslim girls donning the headscarf—the one Malala wears—from attending public schools. Many believed that the 2004 law, which instituted a ban on “conspicuous signs” of religious affiliations in French state schools, was specifically targeting Muslim girls wearing headscarves, and through them, the country’s Muslim minority. The secular republic ostensibly banned the headscarf to safeguard France’s laïcité. But many intellectuals and public figures couched the ban in a rhetoric of gender equality whereby the secular law saves women from the tyranny of their religious communities. Lest we forget, the headscarf controversy itself dates back to 1989, as Joan Scott shows in The Politics of the Veil, when three French Muslim girls (of Moroccan origin) who refused to remove their headscarves were expelled from their Middle School in the Parisian suburb of Creil. Canada will not grant them honorary citizenship, but the King of Morocco himself will intervene to convince them to remove their headscarf when entering a classroom. But, as Scott shows, in a clear demonstration of their personal conviction, they continued to wear the hijab in the school’s hallways and courtyards. Their struggle did not go down in history as a story of Muslim girls’ fight for equal education. Nor did that of fifteen-year-old Cennet Doganay (of Turkish origin) who shaved her head to be able to attend class. Following the ban in 2004, Doganay tried to substitute a beret and a bandana for her headscarf, “but they still refused to let her into class." The BBC, who reported her story, did not ask her to blog about her experience.

There is something about Malala, and it is not the white savior complex,” or not only that. It is the erasures that are enacted by her global circulation as an iconic brown, Muslim girl. Malala screens from view the Laporshias and Cennets in our midst. There is something about her hypervisible presence that further enacts a symbolic violence against the poor, black, and brown bodies, in our midst in Europe and the United States. These bodies are constantly erased from public, undeserving as they are of collective “white” middle-class attention and care. These bodies are ordered to enact their own self-erasure: by being quite, not blogging about injustice; by hiding their difference, not flaunting their scarves; by accommodating dominant social values, not subverting them. Would a million prizes for Malala wash away the hefty price of an American or European education?

Yes, Philadelphia may not be the Swat Valley, but one has to wonder, given the history of mass school shootings in the United States that have taken the lives of American children and teenagers. The Pakistani government, following Malala’s shooting, ratified the Right to Education Bill; the United States has yet to pass a law on gun control. Yes, the girls of Creil were not shot in the head. But the comparison is not meant to suggest similarity. The juxtaposition of these differently-situated young brown female bodies is necessary if we are to grasp the connections between the injustices they face. Mapping these connections does not equalize experiences; it reveals how education is a common discursive thread, differently-deployed, across these stories. It forces us to contemplate the terms of “girls’ right to education,” of which Malala has become the poster child. It impels us to specify the subject of these rights, and to identify those whose exclusion is masked in the process.

Exclusion is universal; it is historical and contextual. In Jim Crow America, black girls were not allowed in public (white) schools. In Taliban-dominated Swat Valley, girls are not allowed in public (boy) schools. In republican France, veiled girls are not allowed in public (secular) schools. In many places around the world, from Philadelphia to Santiago, poor girls (and boys) are not allowed public schools altogether. Schools are places where the exclusionary logics of racism, republican secularism, Islamism, and neoliberalism, as different as they may be, become manifest. Schools are the locus where such exclusions are enacted, learnt and normalized. Schools are where children become versed in the grammar of national culture. They are where “others” are taught that they are unwelcome into the fold of the nation, society, and community.

Exclusion is not a Taliban-created exception. It is all around us. And there is something about Malala, as a poster child for girls’ right to education that is meant to make us think otherwise. There is something about an internationally-endorsed, officially-supported, generously-funded, Nobel-prize nominated, and branded campaign for education, starring a brown Muslim girl, that sharply contrasts with recent student protests in QuebecChile,France, the United StatesSpain, and the United Kingdom (among other places). There is something deeply wrong when gender is deployed as the sole source of inequality that must be addressed (albeit in far-away places). There is something deeply wrong when transnational state feminism displaces class inequalities, deeply felt in the languishing state of public education, onto the body of a Taliban-shot sixteen-year-old girl. Such a displacement undermines Malala’s just cause against religiously-inflected social injustice by making it exceptional, by severing its links to global demands for equal and free education. If feminism is not to be co-opted by a neoliberal discourse, as Nancy Fraser recently argued, we must be aware of the fetishization of gender inequality that makes moot all other inequalities.

Western governments have used the figure of the victimized brown woman in the past to justify overseas action, intervention, expansion. Here, they are also using it to whitewash and legitimate the withdrawal of the state from the public domain. As if this child’s small body, stretched and overblown by awards and honors, is supposed to hide the ever-shrinking state; as if Malala’s inflated body will cast a large enough shadow over the growing pool of bodies the state has abandoned.