Low political participation of women is a manifestation of a complex patriarchal matrix that has subdued women since the inception of the Lebanese state. Joseph (1993, 2005, and 2011) theorized and discussed at length some of the notions that underlie the Lebanese state-building project. Three notions are fundamental to adequately introduce it: Patriarchal connectivity, the kin contract, and political familism.

Patriarchal connectivity, Joseph contends, is a cornerstone of this matrix. It finds its roots in connective selfhood (Joseph,1993). Connective selfhood describes the fluid construct of self among Arab families that defines itself in relation to others and considers intimate others as extensions of itself. It refers to a culturally normative pattern of male and female relationships in Arab families that center-stages familial relations, and links kin and non-kin dynamics in historically, culturally, socially, politically, and economically specific contexts.

“Coupled with patriarchy, connectivity organizes the selves with fluid boundaries in a gendered and aged hierarchy, in a culture that valorizes kin idioms in all relations” (Joseph, 1993). Because of this family-embedded patriarchy, men and elders are entitled to direct the lives of women and juniors and have legally recognized rights and responsibilities in relation to them. Resultantly, kin groups and extended families are recognized as legitimate political actors in Lebanon and as a haven that the Lebanese turn to for protection and resources under a weak incapacitated state. Under a frail state, kin became the anchor of security for Lebanese citizens who used idiomatic kinship in all realms of life: the market, the workplace, and politics.

This gave rise to the “kin contract” (Joseph, 2005). This is the formal and informal understanding that membership in families precedes and preempts membership in the state, and that families can legitimately claim prior loyalty of their members, over and above the state. State actors, political leaders, and militias thus turned to families to mobilize and organize the population; mobilized their own kin, and deferred to the citizens’ kin in matters of relevance to the state, and the law. In this configuration, the political leader is seen as a family member and as an honorary family patriarch, which has paved the way for all leaders to present themselves as the senior patriarchs of the extended political family, calling for the loyalty, deference, and service due to them as heads of families.

This arrangement has multiple consequences: it validates the patriarchal extended kinship as a venue of social and political control, which is the most significant deterrent to Lebanese women’s positioning as full citizens; it confirmed the state’s legitimation of the primacy of kin; and justified the state’s mobilization of religion to sanctify extended kinship. Joseph argues that the kin contract is based in the care/control paradigm (Joseph, 2005). Members receive care from the extended kin but have to accept the presumptions of patriarchal control in return.

This partly explains why most political parties in Lebanon are most often based in family allegiances, and why and how political leadership continued through familial lines – usually passed down from father to son and occasionally to wives or daughters.

Political familism highlights the heavy reliance of Lebanon’s political system, in particular its confessional nature, on the “deployment of family institutions, ideologies, and idioms, practices and relationships by citizens to activate their needs and demands in relation to the state…and by the state/state actors to mobilize practical and moral grounds for governance based on a civic myth of kinship and a public discourse that privileges family.” This system reifies and perpetuates normative gender roles wherein women are constructed as dependents on their male family members and husbands, who are ideologically constructed as the “protectors” and “leaders” of their families. As such, women are ideologically and materially locked out of positions of political power, among other rights.

The trilogy of patriarchal connectivity, the kin contract, and political familism, which centers the family in Lebanon’s political dynamics and tensions, is instrumental in unpacking the country’s political puzzle and understanding the position of women within it. It also contributes to understanding the heteronormative power dynamics and make-up of families, the flowing of these dynamics into wider communities, and how the care-control paradigm is embedded in the political realm in Lebanon. Women’s quotas challenge these dynamics and disrupt the flow of family-based patriarchy traveling from the domestic to the governmental/ political. This patriarchal and heteronormative system is upheld by oppressive legal structures such as the sectarian personal status laws that ensure the subjugation of women within the family.