Focusing on key themes, this chapter highlights how kinship and relatedness constitute a vital lens for understanding gender. First, the everyday is the principal ground for examining relatedness. It illumines how gender shapes our lives and is, in turn, formed, maintained, and altered over time. The borders between gender and other aspects of life can be porous. Second, the seemingly merely domestic or intimate can be generative – a theme that builds on earlier feminist insights. Kinship has wider consequences, including for politics or economics. Finally, kinship is imbued with the potential for hierarchy and inequality, ambivalence, ruptures, and failure. Its generativity includes its less amiable aspects. Gendered inequities and enmities arise from these aspects. Breaks in the fabric of kinship, however, imply the possibility of repair, which may depend on gendered forms of labor. Threading through these themes is care, a key aspect of everyday life and relatedness alike. Care encompasses whole economies and traverses national borders. Care speaks, too, to the vulnerability that is at the heart of what it means to be human. It mirrors, and at times heightens, the difficulties inherent in kinship.

Chapter 3 examines post-1873 depression-era Ottoman novels and plays that articulate a language of difference by juxtaposing the success of industrious heroes against the failure of consumerist dandy anti-heroes. The representation of industrious and dandy characters in fin-de-siècle Istanbul shows the interconnectedness and interdependence between novels and the discourses and practices of productivity, in sharing the same new moral universe. Differing from the normative and distant language of the morality authors, or the authoritative and punitive language of the bureaucratic reforms explored in Chapters 1 and 2, the playful voices of novelists displayed dynamic and at times ambivalent representations of the idle and dandy, as an alternate, yet socially undesirable form of self-fashioning. By pitting a hardworking and upwardly mobile hero against the dandy anti-hero, novels thematized the period’s concern with valuing work as a constitutive element of character and nation-building, and also drew boundaries that defined who was and was not included in the nation. As a forum in which citizenship was debated, fiction established difference using ridicule, marginalization, and even criminalization as a social intervention.

The chapter demonstrates the primacy of ‘the procedural’ in overarching US and European policy documents, as well as in discourses of ‘democracy promoters’. It argues that the underlying structural power dynamics of Jordanian authoritarianism are fundamentally ignored, as the Jordanian regime is in important ways portrayed as a mere result of a lack of capacity among Jordanians at large and at times even as an agent of democratisation. Based on an in-depth analysis of a USAID-commissioned assessment of its Democracy and Governance portfolio in Jordan, and of a political party training event funded by USAID and implemented by the IRI, the chapter discusses different modes of institutional reproduction, as well as the self-perpetuating tendencies of ‘democracy promotion’ in the face of seeming practical failure. Ultimately, the chapter contends that external attempts at ‘democracy promotion’ only strengthen authoritarian stability in the country. Such interventions are thus shown to directly accept, depend on and reinforce the Jordanian regime’s questionable reform narrative, which problematises the imagined ‘Jordanian non-democratic other’ instead of authoritarian structures of power.

The chapter argues that the main character in US and European ‘democracy promotion’ in Jordan is neither Jordan nor democracy, nor an imagined Jordanian democracy, but instead desired self-understandings among ‘democracy promoters’ as ‘modern’, ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’, which are juxtaposed in opposition to the imagined ‘Jordanian non-democratic other’. Through the examples of external civil society support and youth education initiatives, the chapter demonstrates that the continuous functioning of civil society support (understood as its perpetuation rather than the achievement of its desired objectives) depends on a disregard for the specific context in which it operates and the associated ability to maintain the dominance of an often idealised narrative of supposedly universally valid processes of democratisation over everything considered Jordanian. In contrast to what a common understanding of ‘democracy promotion’ would suggest, it is therefore not the overcoming of differences that is central to its functioning, but largely the exact opposite: that is, their maintenance. In particular, the chapter looks at a USAID-funded and NDI-implemented youth education and participation programme, which the NDI itself considers to be one of its largest and most successful programmes in the region.