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SaC

War of Position and War of Maneuver: Sexperts, Sex Pervs, and Sex Revolutionaries

1 May 09 2012 by Sima Shakhsari

[Femen Protest in Paris, Image by Joseph Paris]

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 responses, however, have focused on Mona El Tahawy’s article, which reproduces discourses of violent Arab masculinity and victimized femininity. Here, however, I want to ...

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Covering Iran's Ninjas

3 Apr 03 2012 by Shiva Balaghi

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 and they’ll … take their legitimate complaint to the appropriate authorities who will suspend your press credentials. Hiiiii-yah! It may be time for ...

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Queering the Qur’an? Sacred Ripping and the Holy Homonationalism

10 Mar 10 2012 by Sima Shakhsari

[Islamophobia and Unicorns; Image from Tundra Tabloid]

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 fact, there is no shortage of queer and trans activists who care about nothing more than voting a gay politician into the office and participating in the Human Rights ...

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Let's Talk About Sex

21 Apr 25 2012 by Sherene Seikaly and Maya Mikdashi

This week Foreign Policy published a “Sex Issue.” They explained their decision to feature a special issue with these words Foreign Policy's first-ever Sex Issue…is dedicated…to the consideration of how and why sex—in all the various meanings of the word—matters in shaping the world's politics. Why? In Foreign Policy, the magazine and the subject, sex is too often the missing part of the equation—the part that the policymakers and journalists talk about with each other, but not with ...

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How Not to Study Gender in the Middle East

20 Mar 21 2012 by Maya Mikdashi

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 ...

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في بلاد العجائب

0 Feb 14 2012 by Hussein Youssef

أنا من المنامة، من الجفير تحديداً. نعم، مركز الأسطول الأميركي الخامس دائماً، وعاصمة الثقافة العربية هذا العام. وبعد أن كنت «الخائن» الذي يتفنن مكارثية السلطة في تلوينه «إيرانياً، صفوياً، مجوسياً» في أشهر قانون الطوارئ «العربي». وبحسب الغرض السياسي للسلطة بدأت أطرافها تنسبنا للأجندة الأميركية. فوجدتني منشوراً ضمن قائمة عملاء الـ«سي. آي. إيه» البحرينيين مسؤولاً فيها عن التنسيق مع الموساد! هذا هو الخطاب الذي تحاول سلطة «عاصمة الثقافة» شدّ العصب «العربي» به حولها! (2) من بين التهم السبع التي واجهتها إبان ...

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Without Principle, There is Nothing: On the Undignified Politics of the American Task Force on Palestine

سنان أنطون: العراق تعمق فيه تشويه التاريخ

Zionism ... has over its history shifted from expropriation of the native Palestinians ... to their exploitation as a cheap labor force ... to their exclusion and marginalization. Any class struggle in Israel, which ignored this oppressive relationship would be, inevitably, a false one.

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