Lara Deeb

DR. LARA DEEB, Scripps College, Claremont, California, received funding in April 2018 to aid research on ‘Sect as Social Difference: Responses to Intersectarian Relationships in Lebanon.’ During the grant period, the grantee completed primary field research. The project uses family and social responses to intersectarian committed relationships — both heterosexual marriages and queer partnerships — as a lens through which to investigate the meanings that sectarian identity holds for people in the Middle East. It also analyzes sect as a category of intersectional social difference. Data analysis is still underway, but tentative findings include an upending of common sense assumptions of the ways gender factors into family responses to interreligious marriage. Research have also found that in family discourses about mixed marriage, sect as a category of social difference is sometimes used to mask concern with other forms of difference, especially class and region of origin within Lebanon.