Who’s Your Daddy: Why a Feminist Lens and Praxis are Necessary for the Lebanese Revolution

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Dec 12, 2019 Lebanon
Women protesters forming a line between riot police and protesters in Riad el Solh, Beirut; 19 November 2019. Image by Nadim Kobeissi via Wikimedia Commons. Women protesters forming a line between riot police and protesters in Riad el Solh, Beirut; 19 November 2019. Image by Nadim Kobeissi via Wikimedia Commons.

Who’s Your Daddy: Why a Feminist Lens and Praxis are Necessary for the Lebanese Revolution

By : Maya El Helou

Nearly two months have passed since the revolution started in Lebanon. The sectarian regime, the politicians who guard and sustain it, and the quick-fix economic policies that leave the rich richer and the poor poorer—they all still stand. While Lebanese people are taking to the streets daily, blocking roads, and announcing strikes until their demands for social and economic justice are met, the broader world is celebrating women's "participation and leadership." But the world has long avoided acknowledging that women have always been an integral part of mobilizing for protests both in Lebanon and across the Middle East and North Africa. Leaders and members of political parties who celebrate women's participation in the current protests have opposed criminalizing marital rape, issuing a civil personal status law, efforts to codify women’s right to pass on their citizenship to their children—the list goes on.

As a feminist, I have always known that patriarchy is an integral pillar of the Lebanese regime. But now that the local and international media is celebrating women's participation in the Lebanese revolution, it is important to articulate an explicitly feminist understanding of the Lebanese regime and its mode of governance. That said, what I discuss in this piece are not ideas that emerged from a vacuum, but rather they are part of an ongoing debate among feminists in Lebanon. In this article, I start by establishing that President Michel Aoun is a patriarchal figure, a role that is encoded in his popular moniker "everybody's father." I provide a brief context and background for the current ruling party coalition in light of the 1975–1990 Lebanese Civil War. Throughout, I argue that a feminist lens and praxis can provide different potentialities in this process of revolutionary emancipation. 

When the Lebanese parliament elected President Aoun in 2016, the country was infested with posters calling him “everybody’s father” (bayy al-kil). The term was meant to indicate the political unification of all sectarian parties under his wing. This illusion was especially important given the reconciliation of Aoun and his Free Patriotic Movement with Samir Geagea and the Lebanese Forces. The two parties fought viciously during the civil war, destroying much of Beirut. The ritualized reconciliation and ostensible elevation of Aoun as the president for "all" Christians was commemorated via a celebration cake in addition to an “Ouaa Khayak” concerto. The music video accompanying the song evoked kinship ties of blood and emotional bonds between Christians breaking and mending. The events glossed over years of civil war and a Syrian occupation by depicting the parties’ differences as a simple fraternal dispute among teenagers. 
As a feminist, I have always known that patriarchy is an integral pillar of the Lebanese regime.

Toxic masculinity as an aggressive normative performance of manliness suffuses the atmosphere of the song, its narration, its model of kinship, and its approach to reconciliation. On the one hand, there is something almost viscerally appealing about the simplicity of the “teenage quarrel” narrative: “They were young! They were rash! They did not know what they were doing.” After all, we have all heard the oral histories of the brothers who killed one another on the Green Line, one siding with Geagea and another siding with Aoun. This narrative is affectively encoded within an urban legend of two brothers who fought at the green line against each other. On the other hand, it takes vast reservoirs of unapologetic impunity to confess, after thirty years, that the reason a generation grew up in underground shelters was because of a “teenage phase” (that is, war). War, as Rima Majed reminds us, is a decision between leaders. War is not a spontaneous act of coincidence or teenage fistfight (which is how it is depicted in the reconciliation video clip). War as a form of toxic masculinity is a complex system built on the plural foundation of the Lebanese nation, such as power, conflict saturation, political and economic problems, and a less analytically popular structure: patriarchy.

“Everybody’s father,” is the quintessential teenager, in men’s clothing. The phrase reminds us of the patriarch, and offers, I would argue, a framework by which the current Lebanese state functions under Aoun–and has functioned under others. In the Aoun/Geagea dichotomy, Christian leadership/kinship allows political, economic, and social relations to infiltrate the sectarian state as a simple “family matter.”

Fatherly Protection/Entitlement


Observing “al-ahed al-qawi” (the strong reign) at work, I must note that the Aoun leadership and the FPM political party has promised much: a flourishing economy; twenty-four-seven electricity; and a commuter train in Lebanon. Lebanon is infamous for its “dysfunctional” infrastructure, especially in the essential public service sector. Those promises acted as an immunity wall built to deter accountability for the past. Violent recurrent social relations are not fond of the past; the lords of the civil war constantly avoid acknowledging their histories. For example, the Lebanese school history curriculum stops in the year of the civil war, effectively silencing the civil war. The past is only invoked as a scare tactic, for example, when zu‘ama threaten the return of the civil war for the purpose of parading power. When Aoun came to power, he did so without an apology for all the lives lost by death or forced disappearance during the war he fought with the Lebanese Forces. There was no promise of “I will not do it again.” Aoun did not try to be the remorseful patriarch. 

If we take, for example, the allegory of domestic violence abuse cases where the father is older, sitting at home, policing the household, and punishing whosoever speaks up against him. He sends his kids to work and restricts their access to food and money, taking their salaries by force. Once the father’s power is inadequate to contain the anger of the house, he usually resorts to the other men in the family to assist him in taming resistance. Is this scenario familiar? Now imagine Aoun is the father (everybody’s father), and Lebanon is a big “family” gathering. Of course, this is only one of the many scenarios and forms of how a patriarch runs a family.

One of the most common forms of taming resistance is policing. Policing is critical to how patriarchy sustains itself within gender, economic, capitalist, and political power structures. Policing is the intersection that glues neoliberal economies, the taming of rebels in public spaces, the maintenance of private properties and their condition, and, of course, the very tone of the society. Post-civil war Lebanon is/was a police state, but under the guidance of a strong patriarch, the “daddy” of the nation, policing escalated. Daddy is, in turn, allied with other male figures: the brother (the recently resigned Prime Minister Saad al-Harriri) and with dogmatized figures of governance such as Hassan Nasrallah (the head of Hizballah) and Nabih Berri (head of the parliament and the political party Amal). These male figures work in concert, controlling a broader apparatus of policing that stretches from the public to the public/private and to the private and intimate.

How does this operate in practice? So far in 2019, various state agencies have arrested and interrogated more than sixty people based on Facebook posts and, at times, for circulating WhatsApp messages against politicians—especially those who are close to the ruling regime. The president patriarch is not only entitled to our bodies, but also to our thoughts, expressions, and to any ideology that is not synonymous with the regime’s own. (Honor thy father—ok, daddy). Silencing via policing, whether docile, subtle, or blatant, is one of the main pillars of patriarchal violence that allows its reproduction. Silencing as a forced immaterial tentacle of violence sustains patriarchy by curbing any attempts to come together as a movement or collectives and mobilize against it—or at least it tries to, but that does not mean it is always efficient or applicable.    

Another layer or trait embedded in the syntax of “everybody’s father” is the patriarchal ownership that manifests in so-called “chivalry” of protection. This form of protection entails that to protect land, a human, or even a pet, you need a sense of entitlement over them, their lives, and their bodies. For example, the army and the police are formed around the idea of protecting citizens, and thus are entitled to their bodies. Since entitlement is de facto granted by all (infra)structures of patriarchy, this sense of ownership becomes a form of negotiation and mediation between protection and the lack of thereof.  

In the case of Lebanon, other men in the governmental “family” assist the president in performing this entitlement over the bodies of people. The Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), General Security, State Security, and the president’s political counterparts (the zu‘ama) act like watchful brothers. The LAF is looked up to as the “secular” protector of the people. But the “father” instrumentalizes the subtle power of LAF for the benefit of the power center. For example, when a militia tried to attack the protestors on 25 October, the army used that power to stop the attackers, reminding the people of the importance of their existence. Four days later, the same attack took place in the presence of the riot police, with what seemed like a lose attempt from riot police to form a barrier between the protestors and the militiamen attacking them. The attack took place in an area called "the Ring," a major highway that links different parts of Beirut. The attack took place in the proximity of an army station. A permanently stationed tank and some sort of army station were visible to the naked eye, steps from the attack. As the riot police tried to contain the violence by creating a barrier between the protestors and the militias who were attacking them, it took the army about an hour or so to arrive to the area to separate the attackers (militias) from the attacked (civilian protestors). 

The protection game here is exposed via giving protection and withholding it as a power hierarchy. This power hierarchy’s backbone is exactly this entitlement of the army over the bodies of the protestors; they decide when the protestors should be protected, not the other way around. In other instances, on 23 and 29 October 2019, the army is itself seen attacking, arresting, and policing the roadblock gatherings orchestrated by civilian protestors. The army is the protector, who fluctuates in taking roles of protection at times and withdrawing it at other times. The army is playing that exact game of entitlement and protection where its institutional or regional political alliance with political parties in Lebanon decides whether to protect or arrest protestors. Therefore, the destiny of any type of resistance against the system is always portrayed as arbitrary and full of surprises. That political game is constantly at play and is based on the concealed and abstract process of decision making whether to protect protestors or arrest them. Security agents of the Lebanese governance is constantly shifting alliances.  Decision to protect or attack a protest is mainly another form of abstract patriarchal tyranny where those who are “supposed” to protect civilians (the army, the police) sometimes do, and other time attack protestors. 

The Concept of Consent


Another facet of “everybody’s father” governance is the deployment of assigned-at-birth male kin as a “buffer zone” between the patriarch/president and the people. Gebran Bassil, minister of foreign affairs in the caretaker government, is the appointed president of FPM and the right hand (and son-in-law) of the president. Bassil is one of those “buffer zones.” For example, on the first three days of the October 2019 revolution, Gebran Bassil, a politician who united the streets in their hatred of him, stated on national television that this revolution is his. He claimed that the movement assists the FPM because it will help the political party to push its anti-corruption agenda. The protestors’ reaction to his speech could be best described with the famous feminist phrase “no means no.” They went to the streets and kept protesting to say no, this is not your revolution, but it is a revolution against you.   

It may seem odd to bring up the concept of consent in such situations, but revolutions are, among many other things, about saying no to unacceptable modes of governing. A big clear no; a no that is soon twisted or discursively coopted by the patriarch’s power by either ignoring or twisting it to say, “Oh you say no, but you do not really mean it; you obviously never wanted me, but now you might not want me more, but you still want me.” A revolution is also about acknowledging that “boys will be boys,” as in politicians will do whatever pleases them, is not acceptable anymore. The refusal of the protestors to justify politician’s behavior is an acknowledgment that things might change. It is against another allegory which is “whatever the people do, the politicians will always stay” which is almost like saying “boys will always be boys.” A month into the revolution and the president and his allies are still trying to coopt the street's discourse, still playing the patronizing role of the patriarch who is selflessly worried about the children of the nation. More than a month now and the streets are saying no means no.

This is when the past is purposefully used. For example, in his televised interview on 12  November 2001,  Aoun stated that if the protests do not stop, the country will collapse. Even after a month of strikes and the protestors’ refusal to leave the streets, the government continues to infantilize protestors, denying their constitutional rights to form a transitional government and victim-blaming them. Though Prime Minister Hariri resigned, remaining, however, in the government in a caretaker capacity (a constitutional procedure), Aoun is still insisting on holding his presidential position, even as protestors chant “leave, leave, your reign starved everybody,” and repeatedly demand his resignation. The non-consensual interaction with the state and all its politicians, while there are thousands in the street saying no to them, brings back the conversation to the roots of patriarchy: power, entitlement, and non-consensual violence. Consent is one of the most ignored social relations of every day of struggles and especially in revolutionary moments analysis. 

So Where Are We Now in Terms of Daddy and Kin? (Daddy-kins?)


The ruling party tried to co-opt the movement by claiming it as theirs. The president pretends that he is “everybody’s father.” The system relies upon governance that is predominantly non-consensual. When sweet talk does not work, the male kin give the rebels a disciplining spank. The male kin here can stretch to all state security apparatus, starting with militiamen, the riot police, or the army. Once the spank does not work, the president and his governance tools revert to the past—that specter that is never mentioned unless it is for their benefit. They remind people of civil war, and warn them of the potential for civil war. Here, the patriarchal alliance starts forming among regimes of power to tame the movement via “spontaneous” counter-protests from political parties. 

The game of good cop/bad militia has already been played, and once it did not work for the benefit of the state, the fraternity of army, riot police, and civil and institutional militia both simultaneously contesting one another but also supporting one another started to surface. It is more than a month now and everybody’s father—big daddy—has shown that he is familiar with the demand of the protestors through his speech, but still keeps his position. Ironically, in one of his interviews, the president started his interview with all Lebanese citizens are my children, and I love all of them. The same interview ended with the victim-blaming the protestors for destroying the country and its economy. Moreover, the government is stalling on the dominant revolutionary demand for a technocratic government. Protestors are still in the street; the movement is still vibrant, and with it there are also more obvious codes of patriarchy: morality apparatus, slut-shaming, victim-blaming, and so on, all working as tentacles of violence, sometimes striking together, other times acting singularly. 

Feminist scholars or not, we all need a wider analytical frame to examine the politics of protection, entitlement, and consent. I am suggesting a conversation that aims to develop how we think of governance, and within what context, but also from various perspectives. A feminist lens of looking at the present/past unfolding non-linear events exposes areas and political games that the economy lens alone, or the traditional political lens alone cannot provide. 
Jul 9, 2013 Lebanon
Zeynep Gambetti By :
Zeynep Gambetti

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]