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Egyptian Women: Between Revolution, Counter-Revolution, Orientalism, and "Authenticity"
![[Samira Ibrahim versus Aliaa El-Mahdi. Photo by Suzeeinthecity]](/content_images/3/sm_samiraibrahimvsaliaaelmahdi.jpg "[Samira Ibrahim versus Aliaa El-Mahdi. Photo by Suzeeinthecity]")
The Egyptian revolution appears to present a “gender paradox.” On the one hand, women have been marginalized in many formal political institutions since the downfall of Hosni Mubarak. On the other hand, representations and images of women and women’s bodies have been ubiquitous. Representations of women through media and art, as well as the regulation of women’s sexuality through state laws and constitutions are an essential part of defining national identity and national difference, marking the boundaries between “them” and “us” and constituting the national polity. Representations of women and particular gender orders are also used as symbolic markers to ...
Keep Reading »Settler Colonialism and Alliance: Comparative Challenges to Pinkwashing and Homonationalism
![[Image by Palestinians in Solidarity with Idle No More and Indigenous Rights]](/content_images/3/sm_forscottspeice.jpg "[Image by Palestinians in Solidarity with Idle No More and Indigenous Rights]")
Critics of Israeli pinkwashing in the United States and Canada have increasingly engaged in comparative critiques of settler colonialism. Queers Against Israeli Apartheid in Toronto has invoked this critique for many years. Pinkwatchers across Canada also draw ties between Palestinian and Indigenous solidarity that are heightened by the recent emergence in Canada of the Indigenous people’s movement Idle No More. Today, scholars and activists ask how homonationalism and pinkwashing perform settler colonialism in Palestine, Canada, and the United States, and how settler colonialism in each state impacts their work. I write this piece to encourage such questions, and to ...
Keep Reading »Sexual Violence Against Women and the Increasing Frequency of Gang Rape in Tahrir Square and its Environs
![[Nazra for Feminist Studies logo. Image from nazra.org]](/content_images/3/sm_nazralogoweb.jpg "[Nazra for Feminist Studies logo. Image from nazra.org]")
[The following position paper was issued by Nazra for Feminist Studies on 4 February 2013.] Sexual Violence Against Women and the Increasing Frequency of Gang Rape in Tahrir Square and its Environs With this paper, Nazra for Feminist Studies offers a feminist theoretical attempt to understand the rise of sexual violence against women over the past few months. We believe that it is important to raise this issue so that different political actors, even well intentioned ones, do not exploit women’s concerns. We also wish to contribute to a debate that is currently underway on this sensitive issue based on our past experiences in combating violence ...
Keep Reading »The Gendered Body Public: Egypt, Sexual Violence and Revolution
![[Women March to Tahrir; Image by Gigi Ibrahim]](/content_images/3/sm_cairowomengigi.jpg "[Women March to Tahrir; Image by Gigi Ibrahim]")
We must acknowledge, sit with, and address the sexual violence that has, is, and will occur in and around Tahrir Square. How do we do this work in a responsible and ethical manner that is in solidarity with Egypt's ongoing (and multiple) revolutions? How do we retain and respect political, economic, and social complexity in the face of the horrors of mass and public sexual assault? How to write when all you want to do is shout? Friday, 25 January 2013 was the second anniversary of the outbreak of the Egyptian revolution. Today the revolution continues, as protesters face down government allies and troops across Egypt. Bodies are bruised, bloodied, and killed. Rocks ...
Keep Reading »The Invisible Link: Honor Killing and Global Capitalism
![[Occupy Poster By Just Seeds Artist Cooperative]](/content_images/3/sm_womencapitalism.jpg "[Occupy Poster By Just Seeds Artist Cooperative]")
The unfolding debate about the Palestinian hip hop group DAM’s new music video “If I Could Go Back in Time,” and Lila Abu-Lughod and Maya Mikdashi’s critique of it, has generated an intense visceral reaction on the part of many readers on Jadaliyya and in the blogosphere. DAM produced this music video in collaboration with the director Jackie Salloum and the renowned singer and activist Amal Murkos, to tackle the heinous crime of honor killing in Palestine. Abu-Lughod and Mikdashi took the video to task for treating the horrible phenomenon of honor killing as a social rather than a political problem. Many readers, as well the members of DAM, however, mistook their ...
Keep Reading »Supporting Rula Quawas and Academic Freedom: An Interview With A Former Student
![[Image from screenshot of Supporting Rula Quawas and Academic Freedom]](/content_images/3/sm_rulaqwebsite.jpg "[Image from screenshot of Supporting Rula Quawas and Academic Freedom]")
On 2 September 2012, Professor Rula Quawas was removed from her position as the Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the University of Jordan under nebulous circumstances. In a letter addressed to the president of the university, the president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), Professor Fred Donner, urged the former to repeal his decision. Donner hinted that the decision might have been related to the circulation of a video that Dr. Quawas’ students made for her Feminist Theory course in the fall semester of 2011, which addressed the issue of sexual harassment on the university campus. In the months leading up to the removal of Dr. ...
Keep Reading »Of Wife and the Domestic Servant in the Arab World
![[Image from author.]](/content_images/3/sm_serv.jpg "[Image from author.]")
My goal in this short essay is to capture for the reader the gains and losses associated with Islamic-based family rules in the context of an economy that has a generous supply of cheap domestic workers and a sparing one of female public employment. I do so from the perspective of the housewife who is able to hire a domestic servant. I specifically argue that a spill-over effect of family law rules occurs in a household that employs domestic servants, triangulating the relationship between husband, wife, and servant. On the one hand, rules of the family are as formative of the domestic servant’s life as rules of labor, while at the same time, the presence of ...
Keep Reading »Tradition and the Anti-Politics Machine: DAM Seduced by the “Honor Crime”
We write this piece as (disappointed) fans of the Palestinian hip hop group DAM at a time when the fierce attack on Gaza reminds us of grim realities that are the everyday stuff of life and death for Palestinian women and men. With songs like “Who’s the Terrorist?” and “Born Here,” DAM gave thrilling political voice to a new generation of Palestinians who were no longer silent about the racism of the Israeli state. They challenged the state violence that was devastating Palestinian lives and communities, whether in the ghettos of Israeli cities or the territories occupied, suffocated, and bombarded since 1967. This was political music; sharp, angry, born of ...
Keep Reading »On Positionality and Not Naming Names: A Rejoinder to the Response by Maikey and Schotten
![[An Israeli soldier grabs a Palestinian boy, dressed as a Native American during a protest in Nablus. AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh]](/content_images/3/sm_01-14-03.jpg "[An Israeli soldier grabs a Palestinian boy, dressed as a Native American during a protest in Nablus. AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh]")
[This article was written as a rejoinder to Haneen Maikey and Heike Schotten's response to the authors' article on the intersections and impasses between US centered pinkwashing and pinkwatching activism. Click here to read Maikey and Schotten's response, and click here to read the original article by Mikdashi and Puar.] We thank Haneen Maikey and Heike Schotten for their thoughtful and detailed response to our article. We appreciate the time, effort, as well as political commitment and conviction it took to articulate their concerns about our article. We do not necessarily disagree with many of their points. We would like, ...
Keep Reading »#MuslimRage, #Propaganda, #Empire
![[Subway ad, still from Innocence of Muslims.]](/content_images/3/sm_Screenshot2012-10-06at10.39.07AM.png "[Subway ad, still from Innocence of Muslims.]")
I would like to address the ways in which paid advertisements recently mounted on the New York City public transportation system are connected to the release and circulation of the “Innocence of Muslims” video. Both are made legible through the now-hegemonic grammar of the War on Terror and an archive of Orientalist tropes and themes. It is that same grammar that scripts the protests and violence that erupted across Muslim majority states in reaction to the video (a reaction which was clearly hoped for and incited by the producers) as exercises in rage, a heightened emotional state that precludes rationality. Hatred and rage, we have been told by both the American ...
Keep Reading »Pinkwatching And Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and its Discontents
![[Pinkwashing Propaganda, Images by Blue Star PR]](/content_images/3/sm_MayaJasbir.png "[Pinkwashing Propaganda, Images by Blue Star PR]")
Over the past year, we have been carefully observing and participating in the rise of anti-pinkwashing queer activism in the United States and Europe as scholars, activists and editors of online and print media. This activism has followed a similar, though not equivalent trajectory to activism in the Middle East. Pinkwashing—the process by which the Israeli state seeks to gloss over the ongoing settler colonialism of historic Palestine by redirecting international attention towards a comparison between the supposedly stellar record of gay rights in Israel and the supposedly dismal state of life for LGBTQ Palestinians in Occupied Palestine—has met stiff and ...
Keep Reading »Lebanon, the Sectarianization of Politics, and Genderalizing the Arab Uprisings: Interview with Maya Mikdashi
![[Lebanon-Syria border crossing. Image by Giorgio Montersino]](/content_images/3/sm_2835040727_2ba36c642aaa.jpg "[Lebanon-Syria border crossing. Image by Giorgio Montersino]")
The following interview with Jadaliyya Co-Editor Maya Mikdashi was conducted by Eugenio Dacrema for the Istituto per gli studi di Politica Internazionale (ISPI), on whose website it was originally published on 21 June 2012. In the interview, Maya discusses developments in Lebanon as they related to the uprising in Syria. She also discusses Lebanese politics more generally as well the workings of gender politics in the Middle East. Eugenio Dacrema (ED): A Few days ago a new session of the National Dialogue council started in Beirut, hosted by the president Souliman. The list of issue which will be discussed is officially very long, but obviously the main issues are ...
Keep Reading »Thinking Citizenship in a Revolutionary Arab World: The Intransigence of Difference
The ongoing Arab uprisings that began in Tunisia in late 2010 have demonstrated that citizenship in the Arab Middle East is a subject in need of much critical scholarship and intervention. Many scholars, working from an archive of political philosophy that begins with Rousseau's social contract, have assessed the Arab national project of producing citizens skeptically, as Suad Joseph has demonstrated. Moreover, there is tendency in political theory to view members of authoritarian, corporatist, and ...
Keep Reading »The Empire of Sexuality: An Interview with Joseph Massad
Félix Boggio Éwanjé-Épée and Stella Magliani-Belkacem (FE&SM): In your work and your academic interventions, you have argued that the imposition of the categories of homo-hetero on the non-Western world is inseparable from the politics of imperialism and the dominance of the capitalist mode of production. Can you describe this process? Joseph Massad (JM): The difficulty of speaking about a particular term like sexuality is on account of the ongoing Euro-American efforts to universalize it, and that ...
Keep Reading »This Is A Mass Sexual Assault . . . We Will Resist (Video)
The following video was produced by Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment/Assault. It shows a public and mass sexual attack on a female protestor in Tahrir Square and the efforts to ensure her safety. The footage was edited to highlight exactly what is happening in the moving crush of bodies caught on video. It shows several men publically raping a protestor, with several other men pressing in to partake in the assault. This is not the first time a woman is sexually assaulted during a protest in ...
Keep Reading »Will Civil Marriage End Lebanon’s Confessional System?
In tying the matrimonial knot last week, Kholoud Succariyeh and Nidal Darwish sliced through a cultural, legal, sectarian knot of Gordian proportions. The pair became the first couple in history to be wed in a civil marriage on Lebanese soil. Until last week, Lebanese citizens (or, only those who can afford it) have generally traveled to Cyprus to get hitched. The only way to do the deed inside Lebanon requires a contract issued by religious personal status authorities, with all the legal implications ...
Keep Reading »The Naked Bodies of Alia
Just as we started thinking that Alia al-Mahdy’s nude portrait was a thing of the past, new images surfaced on the web. On 20 December 2012, FEMEN—a Ukrainian women’s movement known for its controversial nude protest actions—posted photos of Alia and two FEMEN members posing naked in front of the Egyptian embassy in Stockholm on their Facebook page. The Facebook group cover photo was updated on the same day, showing a nude Alia raising the Egyptian flag, photo-shopped against a black, red, and white ...
Keep Reading »Honoring Solidarity During Contentious Debates. . . A Letter to DAM From Lila Abu-Lughod and Maya Mikdashi
Dear Tamer, Suhel, and Mahmood, If We Could Go Back in Time… we would have made even clearer that our reaction came from our deep admiration for you and our appreciation of your political and social influence. We are, as we said, fans. Lila has sent your songs to countless people around the world and has made statements about the importance of your art publicly. As the daughter of an exile from Jaffa who lived and worked for Palestine his whole life, she is particularly thrilled with ...
Keep Reading »Exile, Part One
My mother's mother tongue is not Arabic. This singular fact shaped much of my life and my education in Lebanon. When she moved to Beirut, she had two children, and then me in her belly. She met a student named Maya and thought the name sounded beautiful and strange. She has not lived in the country in which she was born - the country in which her family lives, celebrates holidays, and has grown older - for over three decades now. This fact terrifies me. Prior to her moving to Lebanon, my father had ...
Keep Reading »An Overview of the Egyptian Legal System and Legal Research
The Arab Republic of Egypt lies in the northeastern part of Africa. Whilst most of the country is located in Africa, the easternmost part, the Sinai Peninsula, is considered part of Asia and is the only land bridge between the two continents. Egypt is divided into two unequal parts by the Nile River, and its terrain is mostly desert except for the Valley and Delta of the Nile, the most extensive oasis on earth and one of the main centers of habitation in Egypt. While Cairo is the largest city and ...
Keep Reading »Queers Resisting Zionism: On Authority and Accountability Beyond Homonationalism
[This article was written as a response to a recently published article by Maya Mikdashi and Jasbir Puar on the intersections and impasses between US centered pinkwashing and pinkwatching activism. Click here to read Mikdashi and Puar's rejoinder to this response. Clear here to read the original article by Mikdashi and Puar] Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi’s recent “Pinkwatching And Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and its Discontents” challenges those of us who work for Palestinian ...
Keep Reading »Beirut: Security, Surveillance, Navigation
This essay was originally part of a collection of writing on the securitization of Beirut's landcape. In this publication, the proliferation of security measures was examined through the use of both mapping techniques and the narration of life as it is lived under these circumstances. Such a document serves as a call to all those who move through, and those who police, that lived space of the city, a space which is always already refracted through gendered, economic, political dynamics. Initially, I had ...
Keep Reading »Call for Participants: Arab Feminist Knowledge Production Meeting (Beirut, 27-31 July 2012)
Arab Feminst Knowledge Production Meeting 27-31 July 2012 Beirut, Lebanon What are We Calling for Exactly? Young women activist, writers, and feminists have been setting up alternative electronic media websites/blogs to provide more critical coverage and points of views on various issues in the Arab region, including gender issues, Islamophobia, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as well as the recent uprisings in the region. Many of these websites, journals, and even blogs do not have the space to ...
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Crowds cheer as a blow-up doll of Iranian President Ahmadinejad gets raped/sodomized with a nuke by a dungeon master Gay Pride San Francisco 2011
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