· Where do you come from?
· Before I came to live in Slovenia, I lived for a few months in Germany, and before that, I lived my whole life in Jordan. So, am I coming from Jordan?
· Oh, what a nice king and beautiful queen you have!
· As a queer, atheist, and decolonial feminist, this does not sound nice or beautiful.
Oh yes, the royal dictatorial regime! The executive power of a dictator’s crown passes from one patriarchal, nice dictator king to another!
According to Article 195 of the Jordanian Penal Code, criticizing the nice king in any way is considered a crime of “lèse-majesté” and carries a punishment of one to three years in prison.
Under this misogynist monarchy, women in Sharia courts dealing with domestic relations cannot be complete witnesses. In family courts, one man equals two women as a witness. As a woman, you are a half-witness and a half-human. This is still the case in 2024.
But women revive, and women revolute. In 2017, the women’s rights movement managed to abolish the ‘marry your rapist’ law, which excused rapists from any punishment if they marry the women or girls they raped. However, still in 2024, under Article 340, judges continue to give mitigated sentences for men who kill their wives or any female relatives because of “unlawful bed.” This can simply include sexual relations without marriage or before marriage. Under Article 99, men who kill any female relatives can get reduced sentences if the rest of the family excuses them.
According to this toxic patriarchal monarchy, men in Jordan have “Wilaya,” which means legal custody of their children, whereas mothers have “Hadana,” which means nutrition and care work. In cases of divorce, men can supervise how their exes are raising their children. If the ex-wife does not raise the children in the way the man deems it ‘proper,’ he can take them away from her in full custody.
Toxic father figures in Jordan use these theocratic, misogynistic Islamic laws to oppress and intimidate mothers and to take the “Hadana” away from them. They might assert, for instance, that the mother behaved in a non-Islamic manner due to her friendship with men, her “immodest” wardrobe choices, or her non-Islamic childrearing. Meanwhile, even if the father behaves against the best interests of the child, his automatic grant of “Wilaya” will remain in place.
Women cannot remarry if they want to continue providing “Hadana” to their children. However, men, by law, can have four wives. During marriage, women cannot travel with their children without legal authorization from the father, but men can travel freely without any prior notice. Obviously, Jordan’s Islamic custody laws enable patriarchy, misogyny, and violence not only against women but also against children.
In marriage, which is in many cases enforced, rape is not recognized. Marital rape is totally unacknowledged by law, while women are expected to fully obey those who are identified as husbands. It is no surprise that the royal princess Haya, the sister of the patriarchal king, escaped domestic violence and asked for asylum out of Jordan. Because in this theocratic misogynist monarchy in Jordan, women have no access to safety, justice, or equality.
In this toxic-masculine monarchy, individuals are imprisoned due to their sexual orientation or gender identity under the ambiguous law of “debauchery.”
For example, in 2021, the security forces arrested 14 individuals at a private party for being gay. In 2023, a cultural association was interrogated and forced to cancel their events due to a secret report that they planned to present a movie about a love story between two men. Violence against transgender people is institutionalized. Sex change operations are expressly prohibited under Article 8 of Law No. 25 of 2018, carrying penalties of imprisonment ranging from three to ten years.
There are many more gender and sex-based oppressive laws in this patriarchal, nice, and beautiful monarchy, and I only mentioned a few.
You do not hear about the reality of this dictatorial, misogynist royal regime because it is a tool for U.S. neocolonial imperial and patriarchal affairs in the region.
Through a royal decree, this nice dictator king issued a military defence agreement with the U.S. in 2021. This agreement bypassed the parliament, and it gave long-term land access for the American troops to continue bombing Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, among others, harming the human rights and the rights to life of people in the region.
Now, we are witnessing the horrific, continuing genocide against women and people of all genders in Gaza, sponsored by U.S. imperialist affairs and implemented by weapons from the U.S. capitalist arms trade and sponsorship of occupation.
In conclusion, patriarchy and state-sponsored homophobia are enabled by dictatorships, Sharia laws, theocracy, colonization, and neocolonialism. It is no surprise that if you track homophobic laws in the region (which is identified by its colonizers as the Middle East), they take you to historical laws associated with the British Empire and French colonization in the region.
As a queer, atheist, and decolonial feminist,
As a holder of Jordanian citizenship, a former British colony, and a neo-colony of U.S. imperialist foreign affairs,
I know that there are no women’s rights without ending misogynist neocolonialism and its sponsored theocratic patriarchal dictator regimes.
Queer is stateless, and we all know that when settler-colonial states draw their borders, they draw them first on our bodies before they enforce them on the soil.
Freedom of Palestine is the freedom of women and people of all genders from patriarchal, neocolonial arm machines and their theocratic, dictatorial, misogynist allied regimes.