Towards an understanding of female religious identities and sectarianism in the Levant

Abstract

Female religious identities and sectarianism in the Levant occupy a complex position at the intersection of postcolonial fragmentation, patriarchal structures, and dense religious and communal affiliations. Within this context, the study of how female religious identities and sectarian dynamics are formed, transmitted, and contested has been engaged with by a growing yet still limited strand of scholarship, particularly through a postcolonial feminist lens that situates women's experiences within the specific historical conditions of the region. This thesis contributes to this strand by examining how female religious identities and sectarianism are constructed, inhabited, and negotiated by women across postcolonial Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Drawing on Postcolonial Feminist Theory and Social Identity Theory, and employing Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, the study examines three contemporary Levantine films centered on female protagonists, namely Daughters of Abdul-Rahman (Jordan, 2021), Where Do We Go Now? (Lebanon, 2011), and For Sama (Syria, 2019). The analysis traces how each film constructs female religious identities and sectarianism within its specific national context, how it represents women as agents who embody, contest, protect, or rework religious and sectarian belonging, and what convergences and divergences emerge across the three contexts. The findings indicate that female religious identities in these contexts are produced through dense multimodal markers of piety, sustained through relational and societal obligations that complicate the boundary between the private and the public, and continuously reworked by women whose reworkings take place within rather than outside the religious-social fabric. Sectarianism, where present, surfaces as a gendered phenomenon in which women act both as bearers of communal markers and as agents who manage, and at times destabilize, the sectarian line. Across the three films, common patterns emerge in how female religious and sectarian positionings are produced and contested, suggesting continuities that persist across national borders despite the fragmentations of the postcolonial state.