What explains the variation in women’s equality in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) after independence? Existing explanations stress religion, culture, policy changes, or economic resources. These factors cannot fully explain existing variation or why some states change more easily than others. This paper stresses the importance of political factors by building upon, and providing the first empirical test for, Charrad (2001)’s ethnographic study. Charrad (2001) argued that the more autonomy kin-based groups maintained during state formation vis-à-vis a centralizing government, the less the government supported women’s rights. This paper will make three contributions: 1) it generalizes Charrad (2001) to include all MENA countries, not only centralizing states. It does so by arguing that the more kin-based groups consolidated central state control prior to independence, the lower the rates of women’s equality. 2) The paper specifies fertility as a mechanism that links kin-based group strength to lowered women’s equality. This is because the more a kin-based group controlled the state the more important it was for kin-based groups to gain political influence through size. Women were thus encouraged to raise children rather than pursue markers of equality such as employment. 3) The paper develops an empirical proxy for kin-based group strength, despite the lack of direct measures of group size, fertility or power. The empirical test will use cousin marriage rates as a proxy for the strength of kin-based groups, and follow Ross (2008) by using female labor market participation as a proxy for equality. Cousin marriage is a logical proxy for kin-based group strength, because it captures the idea that such groups encouraged women to marry cousins to increase their size; cousin marriage helps ensure all men in the group marry, or in some cases that men obtain second wives. This is not merely another proxy for equality, since marrying a cousin does not, in and of itself, reduce a woman’s equality. Cousin marriage rates come from the Demographic and Health Surveys, Pan-Arab Project for Family Health, geneticist’s surveys and Gulf Health Surveys. Female labor market participation rates will be obtained from Ross (2008). Data as close to independence as possible will be used. The empirical test will be supplemented by historical process-tracing to show how differing structures of imperial rule influenced the extent of a kin-based group’s control over new states.

Based on 22 semi-structure interviews and content analysis of carefully selected relevant advertisement magazines, this article investigates the place of religion in the practice of cosmetic surgery in Iran, a country that has been reported to have the highest rate of rhinoplasty in the world. Although a remarkable opposition to or negligence of Islamic teachings related to the human body was observed that supports cosmetic surgery as a secular action, the body, prone to cosmetic surgery, is not totally disengaged from religion in the Iranian context. Islam, in effect, plays a key role in cosmetic surgery for individuals who undertake it on three different levels : as a barrier to having cosmetic surgery; as a source to legitimize the surgery as necessary and thus, acceptable; and as setting religious conditions for the course of the operation. Particular attention is given to the place of ‘sin’ in this context and how ‘sin’ can be understood as a crucial mechanism that dys-appears the body for the pious individual. A particular emphasis will be given to one special case where at first my subject welcomed the idea of knives cutting her skin and bone to make her more beautiful and she had had a successful surgery. But after about a year she felt that her operation was not religiously acceptable and hence underwent a second surgery to obliterate her ‘sinful nose’ and to ‘restore’ her previous less-attractive but sinless nose. Employing the conceptual and theoretical framework of cultural phenomenology of embodiment I will attempt to shed some light on the significance of the notion of ‘sin’ and its relationship with religion and the body in this context. Briefly, ‘sin’ becomes the centre of the believer’s attention when his or her ‘pious body’ fails to consistently perform in accordance with religious criteria due to the intrusion of sin, and re-establishment of the integrity and piety of his or her body becomes the core objective. In this respect, it is quite possible that empirical descriptions of how the body seeks to reconstitute reality in religious ways might furnish new approaches to understanding how we should think about the sacred character of our worldly embodiment.

In Turkey, corporeal threats to Kurdish and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transvestite or transsexual people target both groups through governing policies and silent practices. In response, LGBTT people in Diyarbakir have been pursuing activism since 2006. Yet those who are LGBTT and Kurdish do not experience violence in the same ways. A focus on the local context of Diyarbakir reveals the reproduction of patriarchy within LGBTT activism according to socioeconomic privilege. In my example, I read one LGBTT group as a contact zone, wherein the important issue of socioeconomic status and moral positions on the “wrong” practice of sexual relations by gay and trans sex workers under local norms of patriarchy and Islam emerge as a social paradox to LGBTT unity. Scripting gay and trans sex workers as those who “have no love or lovers,” and as those who can “legitimately be killed by their families,” some gay and lesbian activists take a moral stance against those who fall outside of their homocentric and socioeconomic norms. Based on research carried out with two local LGBTT organizations in Diyarbakir, Turkey from May to August 2012, using data generated from participant observation and structured interviews with members of Kurdish LGBTT organizations, my research investigates the following questions: why do gay and trans sex workers represent such a source of tension for gay and lesbian activists? What can the role of necropolitics tell us about scales of violence targeting LGBTT activists in very different ways in the Kurdish region of Turkey? Using Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, which explains how power functions in uneven ways, targeting some subjects for death while supporting the lives of others, I focus on interviews with gay and trans sex workers in Diyarbakir concerning their fears of violence. Considering the ways in which gay, lesbian and trans identity exist simultaneously and in tension with local practices of unspoken same-sex desires, I examine the way trans has been reconstructed by gays and lesbians in Diyarbakir in relation to the local context of patriarchy. Further, this study demonstrates that economic logics are central to the ways in which gay and trans woman sex workers in Diyarbakir pragmatically negotiate their positions vis-à-vis established hierarchies. Due to economic necessity, they inhabit a very different subject position from Kurdish gays and lesbians, who remain largely ambivalent to their place of privilege in the broader scope of social life in Diyarbakir.

On April 14, 2009, the “Taliban” murdered a 21-year-old man and a 19-year-old woman in an “extra-judicial honour killing” in Nimroz, Afghanistan, shooting them down in broad daylight after bringing them to a mosque (BBC). While no universally translatable terms for “honour” and “honour-killings” exist in Afghanistan, these and analogous terms are frequently employed by Afghans and non-Afghans alike to categorize such violent events. Such categorizations attribute these acts to primordial oral and written codes of sexual behaviour. My paper asks: what are the formal and informal processes through which “honour” becomes the foremost category of analysis in explaining an array of killings in Afghanistan? Naming events “honour-killings” may obscure and mask multifaceted motivational schemas by ascribing the cause of such actions to a monolithic source. “Honour” becomes both the principal explanatory paradigm in the public and the singular category of analysis for a narrative that is circulated amongst Afghans and non-Afghans alike. This project takes an ethnographic approach to interrogating frames of reference, both formal and informal, to think anew the notion of “honour-killings.” Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Kabul and JalalAbad in 2010 and 2011, my goal in this paper is to unsettle familiar understandings of “honour-killings” by positing what I call the “honour effect,” a discursive framework that transforms complexly motivated killings into singular cultural and affective states. My working hypothesis is that the honour invoked by individual actors cannot be reduced to one causal factor or point of origin, such as Pukhtunwali, Islam, Taliban fat?w?, gender or patriarchy. Instead it is the interplay of various social forces in the formal and informal processes through which honour must be contextualized in order to be rendered intelligible. Killings attributed to honour must therefore address the capillary (bottom-up) level of power inhabiting an interplay of formal and informal processes (Kogacioglu 2004). I seek to illuminate how the everyday practices of violence and the politics of sexuality in Afghanistan configure and are configured by honour-killings as these unpredictable yet familiar acts of violence are systematically folded into social, political, and religious discourses. This paper will contribute to a deeper understanding of the Afghan sexuality that is contextualized in a range of medical, religious, political, and kinship discourses. This paper shifts sexual knowledge about Afghanistan from frozen, compartmentalized, and fixed patterns of coherence into a more dynamic matrix of formal and informal practices in order to render intelligible honour-killings.

Emergency contraceptives are medications or devices that can be used after sex to reduce the risk of pregnancy. Over the last decade, dedicated emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs) have been registered in Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen. Yet, despite Jordan’s longstanding commitment to family planning service delivery for married women at the national level, dedicated ECPs have not been registered. This lack of product registration is somewhat surprising given the robust contraceptive method mix available through the public sector and the relatively strong local pharmaceutical industry. Based on fieldwork conducted over the last eight years, this paper chronicles the journey of emergency contraception (EC) in Jordan and argues that there have been three distinct phases in EC’s history. The first act of the EC drama was influenced by research conducted in the early 2000s suggesting that although knowledge of EC was virtually non-existent among both health service providers and women of reproductive age, there was considerable need for post-coital methods of pregnancy prevention, particularly among unmarried women in the capital. Modest attempts to introduce a dedicated product during this period were thwarted by professional medical organizations precisely because the technology had the potential to be used by unmarried women. In the second phase of EC’s history in Jordan, the influx of Iraqi refugees in the mid-2000s prompted the international humanitarian relief community to call for registration of a dedicated product. However, as EC became conflated with larger debates about the status of Iraqi refugees, mobilized opposition to EC’s introduction from a range of stakeholders mounted. Yet by the end of the 2000s, married and unmarried Jordanian women alike began to approach health service providers with requests for “urgent pills” or “honeymoon pills.” The third phase of the EC saga is centered in the retail pharmacy sector and is characterized by demand from women. Clinicians are increasingly providing women with oral contraceptive pills (to varying degrees of efficacy) for post-coital use. Retail pharmacists have now become key players in the provision of EC and research conducted in 2010 suggests that pharmacists in Jordan are strong, but not yet mobilized, proponents of dedicated product registration. Although the current chapter in EC’s history is still unfolding, the story of EC in Jordan offers instructive lessons of competing political, professional, and medical interests and highlights the importance of women’s agency in expanding access to new and contentious reproductive health technologies.