Abstract
This chapter is devoted to an examination of state-family relations by looking at the political and regulatory making of the family in the modern and contemporary Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The co-constitutiveness of family as social system as well as an ideological trope and the modern nation state has triggered a situation of entanglement, if not amalgamation, between the political and the familial. The different national trajectories of state-building projects as well as the changing politics of reform and modernization have directly affected the ways in which family and kin are absorbed, marginalized and/or reshuffled. Starting from the much-observed ubiquitous family crisis discourse in the region, the chapter explores the different ways in which the hegemonic model of the conjugal, male bread-winner family continues to be invested by different societal as well as political forces. At the same time, it stresses the diversity of social settings and the complexity of forms of selfing subsumed under the generalizing label of family.
Dennerlein, Bettina