Performative Contradictions of Women's Rights and Religious Freedoms: Dissonance across Space and Time

Abstract

This piece deliberates on Rola El-Husseini’s contribution to contemporary debates on double standards and dissonance at the intersection of women’s rights and religious freedom in the Global North by highlighting similar performative contradictions of the past. In exercising thinking through current dilemmas with Mark Twain’s commentary on non-dyadic marriages in the Ottoman Empire and the United States, this reaction suggests that across time and space, whoever the manufactured “other” may be, the processes and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion generally favor the interests of those who hold and seek to maintain the greatest martial, economic, and political power.