Moral Panics, Sex Panics and the Production of A Lebanese Nation

[Snapshots from Lebanese Ministry of Tourism Videos, Compiled by Maya Mikdashi`] [Snapshots from Lebanese Ministry of Tourism Videos, Compiled by Maya Mikdashi`]

Moral Panics, Sex Panics and the Production of A Lebanese Nation

By : Maya Mikdashi

In the past few months sex panics and moral panics, centered on gendered bodies and abuses, have rocked Lebanon.  In this article I want to revisit three of these panics: photos of a semi-nude Lebanese Olympic Skier’s body and reactions to it; the impunity of wife murderers and wife abusers; and the razing of a Syrian makeshift refugee camp after (ultimately false) accusations of sex abuse by a camp resident of a mentally disabled Lebanese man. I bring these three cases together in order to think about the political work that the moral/sex panic does in making and remaking Lebanese national identity and in articulating its gendered architecture.  I do so in order to avoid thinking each separately under the rubrics of sexual discrimination or abuse in Lebanon. 

Good Bodies, Bad Bodies

Jackie Chamoun is a skier representing Lebanon at the Winter 2014 Olympics. Her qualification for the premier international sporting event is itself a success, given the lack of training infrastructures and support for athletes (particularly females) in Lebanon.  Recently, photos a friend of Chamoun’s took for a calendar, featured the athlete in various poses (though not full frontal) and topless. The photos spread through the Internet like wildfire. In response, the Caretaker Lebanese minister for Youth and Sports, Faisal Karami, ordered an investigation into the photos. He stated that they, and by extension Chamoun, were damaging to the country’s image. In a country with chronic youth unemployment and a widely corrupt professional sports system, as well as the lack of support for sports and youth more broadly, it was these photos that were just too much for the good minister. Almost immediately, people reacted, both positively and negatively, to Karami’s announcement.  But what was the image of Lebanon that Karami wanted to protect, and why was the site of a female athletic body—and athletes, given that their bodies are their work, are rightly proud and confident in them— so threatening to that image?

Lebanese activists rightly pointed out that campaigns marketing everything from veterinary services to the country itself (in Ministry of Tourism advertisements) rely on female nudity and the consumption of the sexualized female body. Sex tourism is a large industry in Lebanon, and the trafficking of women for sexual labor is an open and largely unremarked upon phenomenon, as is the sexual abuse of domestic/slave labor.  Furthermore, male athletic bodies are often in states of undress, as they rip or lift their shirts after scoring in a football or basketball match—and yet they do not damage the country’s image. In fact, the amount of nudity displayed by Chamoun in the photo shoot was no more than any male swimmer in an athletic competition, in or out of the pool.The different weighting of female and male bodies, of nudity, and the uneven distribution of national identity and honor across this gendered divide deserves attention.  The fact that Chamoun is female, and thus “obscene” when topless, is exactly the “problem.”  Nudity is not the issue here.  Female nudity—outside the confines of consumerism or state driven tourism—is.  Chamoun’s displaying of her body, the very thing that enables her to compete at such high levels, sealed her fall from national grace. It also revealed the ways that gendered bodies constitute the seams of the nation as it produces and markets itself. 

Chamoun was supposed to be a “good girl,” a hero for Lebanese to look up to as she represented her country at the Olympics. She was supposed to represent the nation as the nation wished to present itself. Other contexts—such as drives for tourism or the phenomenon of Lebanese music videos—require “bad girls.” Crucially, both “good girls” and “bad girls” are not supposed to be sovereign over their bodies and the representation of them. It is the (masculinist) state and the economy, both of which are said to be in service of “the nation” that decides the form and content of that representation. After all, why would Lebanese women have sovereignty over the representation of their bodies when they lack sovereignty over their bodies in Lebanese law and are instead legal appendages to male citizens?

Dead Wives, Protected Husbands

Recent cases and reports of husbands killing their wives further clarify how Lebanese law renders female citizens as legal appendages of their male counterparts. As of February 17th, husbands reportedly killed twenty-five women were identified in Lebanon. The actual number of such crimes is undoubtedly higher. Not one of these husbands has been charged with a crime (yet).  Much activist and journalistic attention has focused on the urgent need to pass a domestic violence law that protects women and children in Lebanon from physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.  Political and religious leaders have refused to pass a law that includes the criminalization of marital rape. A truncated domestic violence law has similarly stalled in the political paralysis of the halls of the government. Even if such a law were to pass, however, it would do little to ameliorate the legal, social,and economic inequalities that tie wives and daughters to their husbands and families and make them more vulnerable to abuse. For example, custody laws make it almost impossible for a woman to divorce her husband and retain custody over her children, even if she can prove a pattern of abuse against her.  Faced with these impossible choices, many women endure abusive marriages in order to remain with their children. Divorce law largely favors males, across all Christian and Muslim personal status laws. Criminal law, meanwhile, sets different standards for male and female adultery, in addition to continuing to except marital rape from punishment and allowing rapists to propose marriage to their victims and receive lesser punishments.

Furthermore, the presence of a domestic law will not magically make the reporting of domestic violence more acceptable or available. It will not make the police take such calls seriously and stop them from deferring to husbands. It will not make them recognize that one, abuse is abuse and that two, abuse is not a “private” issue to be dealt with at home and between families—the very context within which abuse is happening.

Feminists know that appealing to the state and its police has always been a double-edged sword. After all, the state and its police the security forces are masculinist and patriarchal structures. The extent to which they are sexist institutions interested in protecting male privilege over female bodies is clear every time a wife is murdered or raped or abused and politicians and the police refuse to consider this a punishable offense.  The patriarchal nation, and the masculinist state reproduced themselves at these moments.  Women represent the nation, but men—who are produced as male citizens in part through their legal mastery over female bodies, constitute it. Activist and family demands for accountability as well as the calls for a domestic violence law are much needed interventions. Together they confront the legal, social, bureaucratic and economic ways that female citizens are produced as always in relation to their family status.

Sex Panics and the Borders of the Nation

In December of 2013, allegations were made that residents of a Syrian refugee tent settlement in eastern Lebanon had raped a mentally disabled Lebanese man. The Lebanese army raided the refugee encampment and arrested dozens of men for questioning. They did not find any evidence of the attack. A medical official testified that he had found no evidence of rape on or in the alleged victim. Undeterred, members of neighboring villages raided the refugee campsite and burned much of it down—displacing the Syrian refugees once again. The Lebanese citizens who had made the apparently false accusation and then forcibly displaced the Syrian refugees were not charged or investigated for any criminal or civil offense.

This incident demonstrated the ways that distinctions between “Lebanese” and “Syrian refugee” are articulated across understandings of violable bodies. A false accusation of Syrian male-Lebanese male rape produced a sex panic that in turn allowed the violation of Syrian bodies.  The constitutive outside of the Lebanese nation has historically been the Palestinian refugee and the domestic laborer. Today with over one million Syrian refugees seeking refuge in Lebanon—often in impoverished and disenfranchised areas of the country—Syrian bodies are tasked with articulating national difference. The sexual abuse by Lebanese (and rich tourists) of Syrian women and girls is endemic. Male and female prostitution has become a primary way for Syrian refugees to earn a living. Neither of these phenomena unleashes sex panics. In this framework, Syrian bodies become that which can be violated by Lebanese. The fact that it was alleged that the accusation of rape was concocted in order to remove the Syrians from their villages only underscores the ways that sex panics license violent convulsions that re-entrench who is inside and outside the nation. Thus the accusation that a Lebanese male body was violated enabled the violation of an entire Syrian refugee community. Such logic—that national boundaries can be articulated across availability for violence—is also at play when it comes to domestic labor. In a similar fashion, the draft domestic violence law—in its present form at least—does not address violence against domestic labor. This omission reproduces foreign labor as “outside” the imagined Lebanese heteronormative family as-nation.

Moral panics and sex panics do not (only) reflect a country’s social or political realities, they articulate and help shape them—especially at moments of deep civil and political unrest, a context that defines today’s Lebanon.  Chamoun, the murder of wives by husbands, and the violation of a Syrian refugee camp, each articulate how the Lebanese state and nation define and represent themselves across gendered architectures of citizenship and non-citizenship. Lebanese female bodies are legally tied to male bodies. They are tasked with the marketing of the nation—the good, asexual body and the bad, sexually available body are always female.

What holds this gendered architecture together as nation are constitutive “outsiders”—domestic and migrant labor, Syrian and Palestinian refugees. Lebanon must protect “their women” (and feminized men) from these outsiders as they are simultaneously made available for violation by members of the Lebanese nation.  At each of these moments, moral panics, and sex panics bring into focus the ways that both Lebanese citizenship and national imaginaries are gendered and the ways that sexual difference operates and is operationalized politically. Thinking these moments together, rather than as separate moments of sexism, racism, classism or xenophobia, allows us to interrogate the nation as it produces itself, particularly at times when the nation itself is said to be in crisis.

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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.