Ethics and Politics of Intimacy in the Middle East

Catalog description

Intimacy is often a synonym for proximate, close relations, connected with the interior and the personal: sexual and romantic relations. It is associated with private embodied life, the realm of psychology, desires and emotions. Intimacy as an analytical concept in social sciences draws on these micro-level (private) meanings, but also introduces macro-level (public) socio-economic, cultural, and political dimensions, including power relations. This course explores the ethics and politics of intimacy in contemporary Middle Eastern societies. We examine these transformations in a comparative manner, including various countries (Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, UAE, etc.), though Iran will be our main geographical focus. We will discuss marriage, family, kinship, gender, and sexuality and evaluate the impact of modernity, globalization, capitalism, and individualism on shifting notions of romantic love and companionate marriage in Muslim societies.