No abstract

No abstract

The Arab brother/sister relationship has been overlooked, romanticized, or seen as an extension of the patriarchal father/daughter relationship. The central role of the brother/sister relationship in the reproduction of Arab patriarchy, as a result, has been missed, misconstructed, or underestimated. This article argues that Arab brothers and sisters in Borj Hammoud, Lebanon, developed connective relationships based on love and nurturance, while paradoxically also based on power and violence. These dynamics were manifested psychodynamically, social structurally, and culturally. Connectivity, love, and power underwrote the central role played by the brother/sister relationship in the reproduction of Arab patriarchy, [family culture, psychodynamics and social structure, gender, urban working class, Lebanon]

The nation/state as an imaginative enterprise encompasses multiple imagined subnational boundaries. The ‘public/private’, I suggest, is a ‘purposeful fiction’ constitutive of the will to statehood. As such, its configurations are impacted upon by the institutions and forces competing with and within state-building enterprises. Proposing the terms government, non-government and domestic as analytical tools to demarcate discursive and material domains, I argue that, in Lebanon, the fluidity of boundaries among these spheres is constitutive of patriarchal connectivity, a form of patriarchal kinship linked to the state-building enterprise.

No abstract