%0 Journal Article
%T Critical theory, authoritarianism, and the politics of lipstick from the Weimar Republic to the contemporary Middle East
%A Janet Afary
%A Roger Friedland
%J Critical Research on Religion
%@ 2050-3040
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/2050303218800374
%X In 2012¨C13, 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 womenĄŻs 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 menĄŻs attitude toward cosmetics and womenĄŻs employment. We wanted to know if the same was true of the contemporary MENA. Our results suggest that lipstick and makeups as well as womenĄŻs employment are not just vehicles for sexual objectification of women. In much of MENA world a married womanĄŻs desire to work outside the house, and her pursuit of the accoutrement of beauty and sexual attractiveness, are forms of gender politics, of womenĄŻs 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
%K Frankfurt School of Critical Theory
%K Erich Fromm
%K womenĄŻs employment in the Middle East
%K women in Modern Iran
%K hijab in Middle East
%K lipstick and makeup in the Middle East
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2050303218800374