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Gender
Artistic Depictions of Arab Women: An Interview with Artist Lalla Essaydi
![[Les Femmes du Maroc #35 by Lalla Essaydi. Image provided by artist]](/content_images/3/sm_Fullscreencapture516201290758PM.bmp.jpg "[Les Femmes du Maroc #35 by Lalla Essaydi. Image provided by artist]")
The intersection of gender, perception, identity, and space have, for centuries, collided to illustrate a skewed depiction of Arab women. The art of Orientalism brought about imagined scenes of women in harems, hidden in seclusion behind veils and walls. As these images continue to shape Western perception of Arab women, Moroccan-born artist, Lalla Essaydi, reclaims and deconstructs these images. In her exhibit, Lalla Essaydi: Revisions, at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, through her experiences as an Arab woman living in the West, she presents her past. Samia Errazzouki (SE): What themes does your show Lalla Essaydi: Revisions at ...
Keep Reading »ثورة الجسد
لم يضرم الشاب التونسي، محمد البوعزيزي، النار في نفسه بل أضرمها في جسده. فعندما قام يوم الجمعة ١٧ ديسمبر/كانون الأول عام ٢٠١٠ بسكب الوقود على جسده وإشعاله احتجاجاً على بطش السلطات كان يرسل رسالة واضحة مفادها أن باستطاعة جسده أن يعبر عما تجيش به نفسه بشكل أبلغ من أي شكوى يكتبها وبطريقة أبلغ من أي هتاف يردده. وبالفعل كان من جراء هذا الفعل الدرامي أن سقط نظام من أقوى الأنظمة العربية ومن أشدها قمعاً واستبداداً. الجسد والعسكر إن هذا اليقين ببلاغة الجسد وقدرته على تحدي السلطة رأيناه يتمثل في أشكال أخرى في مصر. فخالد سعيد الذي قام شرطيان بضربه حتى الموت يوم ٦ يونيو/حزيران عام ٢٠١٠ أصبح أيقونة الثورة المصرية ليس بسبب مقطع الفيديو الذي يظهر فساد الشرطة المصرية ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran
Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Amy Motlagh (AM): Part of the study of literature is obsessive re-reading. In this case, I became preoccupied with what I felt was a narrow translation of a word in the English edition of Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (which is perhaps the only Persian novel to achieve the status of a work of “world literature”), giving rise to an interpretation of the novel that seemed to conceal some of the complexities of how this could be read in the Persian. Although the preoccupation with that particular word ...
Keep Reading »الرجل و المرأه صنوان لهما كرامة واحده
تعاني المرأة من مشاكل عديدة في كل المجتمعات، و تختلف حدة و نوعية هذه المشاكل من مجتمع إلى آخر. و المرأة العربية ليست إستثناء من هذا التعميم. و لكن المؤكد أن مشاكل المرأة العربية ليس سببها كراهية الرجل لها لأن هذه الكراهية المزعومة لا وجود لها. و الزعم بأن الرجل العربي يكره المرأة ـ كما جاء في مقال منى الطحاوي في مجلة فورين بولسي Foreign Policy
Keep Reading »Politics at the Tip of the Clitoris: Why, in Fact, Do They Hate Us?
![[Two migrant domestic workers, not allowed a day-off on Sunday, wave to the parade from their employer’s balcony during Migrant Workers May Day Parade in Beirut on 29 April 2012. Image by Hisham Ashkar]](/content_images/3/sm_beyondtheclit.png "[Two migrant domestic workers, not allowed a day-off on Sunday, wave to the parade from their employer’s balcony during Migrant Workers May Day Parade in Beirut on 29 April 2012. Image by Hisham Ashkar]")
What baffles me most about Mona Eltahawy’s Foreign Policy article is that it does not accomplish the task it sets out for itself; it does not, in fact, answer its foundational question: Why do they hate us? Instead of focusing on the why, identifying the structural reasons behind sexism and misogyny in the Arab world, Eltahaway provides illustrative evidence of the oppressions Arab women face; the list is by now all too familiar both in the West and in the Arab world. The images of a naked woman’s flawless body covered in a niqab of black paint, spread throughout the article (and on the Foreign Policy special sex issue cover) is only a bitter reminder of the resilience ...
Keep Reading »![[مظاهرة في بغداد عام ١٩٣٩. المصدر غير معروف]](/content_images/3/sm_Baghdad1939.jpg "[مظاهرة في بغداد عام ١٩٣٩. المصدر غير معروف]")
Young Women Demanding Justice and Dignity: By All Means Necessary
Amina Filali was a young Moroccan girl who was raped at the age of 15 then forced to marry her rapist. She was battered, bruised, and starved until she committed suicide in March 2012. She was 16 years old. Contributing to Amina’s suicide are her rapist turned husband, article 475 of the Moroccan penal code that absolves an aggressor of his crime once he consents to marrying his rape victim, the judge who called for a mediation instead of a prosecution against the offender, the police, and the religious clerics who have given their blessings to the rapist. Amina’s suicide exposes, once again, an entirely flawed legal system and deeply distorted patriarchal honor code ...
Keep Reading »How Not to Study Gender in the Middle East
![[Changes in traditional Sudanese dress. Image by Khaled Albaih]](/content_images/3/sm_large.jpg "[Changes in traditional Sudanese dress. Image by Khaled Albaih]")
One: Gender is not the study of what is evident, it is an analysis of how what is evident came to be. Two: Before resolving to write about gender, sexuality, or any other practice or aspect of subjectivity in the Middle East, one must first define what exactly the object of study is. Be specific. What country, region, and time period forms the background picture of your study? Furthermore, the terms “Middle East,” “the Islamic World” and the “Arab world” do not refer to the same place, peoples, or histories, but the linkages between them are crucial. Moreover, the “state” is a relatively new phenomenon in the Middle East. In order to study gendered political economy in ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Mervat Hatem, Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
Mervat F. Hatem, Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Life and Works of `A’sha Taymur. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Mervat Hatem (MH): The modern construction of Egyptian history gives the grand old men of nineteenth-century Egyptian modernity (Khedive Ismail, Sheikh Rifa` Rafi` al-Tahtawi, and judge Qasim Amin) credit for promoting the interests of women by respectively building the first general school for women in al-Siyufiya (1873) and publishing one important book that supported the education of women (1873) and another to advocate their liberation through the abolition of the ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao, Women's Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent
Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao, editors, Women’s Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent. Special issue of SOCIALDIFFERENCE-ONLINE (December 2011). [SOCIALDIFFERENCE-ONLINE is a publication of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University, an advanced study center that promotes innovative interdisciplinary scholarship on the role of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race in global dynamics of power and inequality.] Jadaliyya (J): What made you organize the workshop that led to this special issue? Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao (LA-L and AR): The workshop grew out of a project called “Who’s Afraid of Sharia?” that we ...
Keep Reading »Sanctions Against Iran: A Duplicitous "Alternative" to War
Media reports on Iran oscillate wildly between threats of imminent military action and hopeful reports of diplomatic progress. Amidst this confusing din, there is a constant truth: the United States has not ceased its economic bullying of Iran, nor has the threat of war receded. As Dennis B. Ross, the Obama Administration’s former Iran advisor, told the New York Times, “now you have a focus on the negotiations...It doesn't mean the threat of using force goes away, but it lies behind the diplomacy.” This ...
Keep Reading »War of Position and War of Maneuver: Sexperts, Sex Pervs, and Sex Revolutionaries
The recent issue of Foreign Policy on sex has instigated critical feedback from many who have rightly challenged racist and Orientalist representations of gender and sexuality in the Muslim and Arab worlds. Several critics have rightly pointed out that essentialist approaches to culture that rely on facile binaries of men/women, freedom/oppression, and West/East lack any meaningful analyses of geopolitics, economy, colonial and post-colonial formations, and historical nuances. Most of these ...
Keep Reading »Iran and the US Anti-War Movement
[This article is based on a talk given at the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Conference on 24 March 2012 in Stamford, Connecticut. It was part of a workshop called, “Solidarity Not Intervention,” organized by Raha Iranian Feminist Collective. Just before this workshop, the conference overwhelmingly voted down a resolution put forward by Raha and Havaar: Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions, and State Repression that read: “We oppose war and sanctions against the Iranian people and stand ...
Keep Reading »Boycotting the Equality Forum: Statement by Professor Katherine Franke (Director of Columbia Law School Center for Gender & Sexuality)
[Below is the text and video of the statement issued by Katherine Franke in relation to her endorsement of the academic boycott of Israel. Franke is the Director of the Columbia Law School Center for Gender and Sexuality.] Remarks to the Equality Forum World Summit 2012 Panel on Legal Issues, 4 May 2012 Hi, I’m Katherine Franke from Columbia Law School, and I’m sorry I can’t join you today in person at the Equality Forum’s panel on legal issues, I want to thank you for indulging my presence by ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Farzaneh Milani, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement
Farzaneh Milani, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Farzaneh Milani (FM): In a way, Words, not Swords is a rebuttal to my first book, Veils and Words. The central argument of Veils and Words revolved around Iranian women's literary output. I claimed that the veil had covered not only Iranian women's bodies, but also their literary voices. Women's self-expression, either ...
Keep Reading »Covering Iran's Ninjas
On the evening of 29 March, a line in my twitter feed read, “You don’t want to mess with Iran’s lady ninjas.” Cara Park’s snarky comment had been retweeted by someone I follow in Cairo. I clicked her link to find she’s a deputy managing editor of Foreign Policy, blogging on the suspensions of Reuters’ accreditation in Iran over their reporting on women training in ninjutsu: In case it wasn’t obvious, you don’t want to offend a highly-trained cadre of Iranian ninjas. Anger these black-belted beauties ...
Keep Reading »Notes from Western Sahara: An Interview with Fatma El-Mehdi
As the Arab Spring spread across several countries in the Middle East and North Africa, American philosopher Noam Chomsky argued that it did not originate in Tunisia, as is commonly understood. “In fact, the current wave of protests actually began last November in Western Sahara, which is under Moroccan rule, after a brutal invasion and occupation,” Chomsky stated. “The Moroccan forces came in, carried out - destroyed tent cities, a lot of killed and wounded and so on. And then it spread.” The ...
Keep Reading »Queering the Qur’an? Sacred Ripping and the Holy Homonationalism
It may be hard to imagine that here, in the hot and humid Texas, being queer is “cool.” Believe it or not, Houston has a lesbian mayor and one of the first transgender judges in the nation. Hell, if it was not for the rest of Texas, gay marriage could possibly be legal in the land of Lawrence vs. Texas. But, the “feel-good” hegemonic queer culture in Houston is at best an epitome of American exceptionalism with an intense love for gay/queer normativity, or what Lisa Duggan has termed homonormativity. In ...
Keep Reading »The Uprisings Will be Gendered
Women's rights and the regulation of gender and sex norms in the Arab world have long been put under the spotlight by local and international activists in addition to local and international politicians and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). This year, the ongoing uprisings in the Arab world have brought into focus some dominant ways that sexual and bodily rights are framed, gendered, and politicized. These can be grouped under three loose themes, each of which deserves further study: One is the ...
Keep Reading »The Syrian Revolution on Four Packs a Day
Who populates the Syrian revolution? The Syrian revolution has three core populations: urbanite survivors of the 2001 Damascus Spring, disenfranchised classes rural and urban, and the traditional opposition. Local histories—not dissidents abroad nor foreign entities—create and power this revolution. Yet, some international analysts remain blind to the people of our revolution.
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