Sex and Citizenship

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has implemented major changes to its gender and labor policies, rearticulating the role of Saudi women and migrant workers in the economy. Women’s empowerment is at the heart of the Saudi state’s post-Vision 2030 narrative, the government’s strategic blueprint for s..

Today, we are asked to watch, over and over again, the mass violation of Palestinian bodies, including sexualized torture, to consume testimonies of Palestinian women being raped while in Israeli military custody, to digest the public displays of women’s underwear in the bombed out streets and h..

As we watch with horror Israel’s escalating genocide of the Palestinian people, Palestinian feminists and our allies have also had to deal with the accusations of not caring about sexual assault and rape when the victims are Israeli. “Silence is violence, but not when it comes to Israeli rape vi..

As scholars in feminist, queer, and trans studies who are rooted in social justice praxis, we refuse to stay silent while a genocide is ongoing in Gaza and a brutal war is unleashed to ethnically cleanse Palestine once again. 

Mass deprivation and transgression of women’s rights and the establishment of gender apartheid are often presented as a reflection of cultural and ideological norms and assumptions. This does not suggest that certain cultures are more prone to gender apartheid than others; rather, a state or act..

In the past month, gender became a buzzword in Iraq’s mainstream media and political discourse. An ideologically motivated campaign led by factions of the Iraqi political establishment has demonized and banned the use of the terms gender, social sex, and homosexuality, accusing those who use the..

On September 16, 2022, Mahsa Zhina Amini, a twenty-two-year-old woman from the Iranian province of Kurdistan, died in Tehran due to injuries incurred while in police custody. She was arrested three days earlier by the “morality police” for allegedly violating the state-enforced Islamic dress cod..

Sexual politics in Turkey, particularly during the reign of the neoliberal conservative AKP, have represented both the embodiment of moral standards and various forms of opposition. The queer movement experienced its most prominent public presence during the Gezi uprisings, which subsequently op..

Disasters reveal and intensify already existing relations of power and forms of discrimination and exclusion. Turkey, Kurdistan and Syria have not been exception to this harsh reality since several cities were fatally hit by earthquakes beginning on February 6. This disaster has ..

As a diasporic Moroccan woman living in the US and a scholar of the transnational politics of affect, gender, and sexuality, watching the broadcast and media coverage of the Moroccan football team in the 2022 World Cup was to experience an exhilarating, liberatory, and soul-nurturing sense of re..

The future of Iran could be changed forever by the protests in September 2022 sparked by the death in police custody of Jîna (Mahsa) Amini, a Kurdish woman from the city of Saqez who was arrested for wearing her hijab “improperly.” The protests have generated an inspiring and new..

After Jina Mahsa Amini was murdered by the morality police (ershad) on 16 September 2022, and protests spread both inside and outside of Iran, Iranians started using Twitter more than ever before. Many tweets began by explaining why people have taken to the streets to protest against Ir..