RT Article
T1 Critical theory, authoritarianism, and the politics of lipstick from the Weimar Republic to the contemporary Middle East
JF Critical research on religion
VO 6
IS 3
SP 243
OP 268
A1 Afary, Janet
A1 Friedland, Roger 1947-
LA English
PB Sage
YR 2018
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1662770219
AB In 2012-13, we signed up for Facebook in seven Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries and used Facebook advertisements to encourage young people to participate in our survey. Nearly 18,000 individuals responded. Some of the questions in our survey dealing with attitudes about women's work and cosmetics were adopted from a survey conducted by the Frankfurt School in 1929 in Germany. The German survey had shown that a great number of men, irrespective of their political affiliation harbored highly authoritarian attitudes toward women and that one sign of authoritarianism was men's attitude toward cosmetics and women's employment. We wanted to know if the same was true of the contemporary MENA. Our results suggest that lipstick and makeups as well as women's employment are not just vehicles for sexual objectification of women. In much of MENA world a married woman's desire to work outside the house, and her pursuit of the accoutrement of beauty and sexual attractiveness, are forms of gender politics, of women's empowerment, but also of antiauthoritarianism and liberal politics. Our results also suggest that piety among Muslims per se is not an indicator of authoritarianism and that there is a marked gender difference in authoritarianism. Women, it seems, are living a different Islam than men.
K1 Erich Fromm
K1 Frankfurt School of Critical Theory
K1 hijab in Middle East
K1 lipstick and makeup in the Middle East
K1 women in Modern Iran
K1 women's employment in the Middle East
DO 10.1177/2050303218800374