[The following is a call for chapter proposals contributions to a forthcoming book, Arab Feminist Epistemologies of the Gulf: Thinking Feminist Theory from the GCC (working subtitle). The book will be published Open Access by Amsterdam University Press/Central European University Press. Send proposals to the editor, Dr. Lana Sirri (l.sirri@uva.nl).]
Book Description
What happens when we approach the Arabian Gulf not simply as a region to which feminist theory is applied, but as a location from which feminist knowledge and theory are produced?
This edited volume brings together feminist scholarship grounded in and critically engaged with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to examine what feminist thought grounded in the region can reveal about the assumptions and limits of dominant Anglophone and Euro-Atlantic feminist theory.
Despite the region’s complex social, political, cultural, religious, and ethno-linguistic landscapes, the Gulf remains significantly underrepresented in Anglophone feminist scholarship. When the region does appear, discussions have frequently centred on familiar questions of women’s rights, religion, patriarchy, legal reform, and the status of women. These remain important areas of inquiry. Yet this framing can reproduce a particular division of intellectual labour: feminist concepts and theories are developed elsewhere, while the Gulf becomes the empirical context in which they are applied, tested, or illustrated.
This volume seeks to reverse that direction. It approaches the GCC as a site of feminist knowledge production and asks what scholarship grounded in the region can contribute to questioning concepts and assumptions that are often presented as universal within feminist theory. Rather than understanding feminist thought from the Gulf as a regional variation of theories produced elsewhere, the volume examines how the region’s particular histories, political formations, religious and intellectual traditions, migration patterns, class relations, citizenship regimes, and forms of belonging shape particular feminist questions, concepts, and forms of knowledge.
The volume does not seek to establish a singular "Gulf feminism," nor does it present the GCC as representative of Arab feminist thought more broadly. The Gulf is itself internally diverse, shaped by distinct histories and by complex relations of citizenship, ethnicity, race, class, religion, and migration. It is precisely this specificity and complexity that makes the GCC a productive location from which to think critically about feminist concepts that have largely been formulated within Euro-Atlantic intellectual traditions.
Inspired by Mona Kareem’s Manifesto Against the Woman (2016), the volume is particularly interested in scholarship that questions concepts and categories that feminist analysis sometimes takes for granted. The volume therefore aims not simply to add the Gulf to existing feminist debates, but to examine how thinking from the Gulf might complicate, unsettle, or expose the limits of some of the assumptions through which those debates have been framed.
Themes and Contributions
We invite original chapters that approach the GCC as a site of feminist knowledge production and engage critically with established debates in feminist theory, gender studies, sociology, and related fields.
The volume already brings together contributions engaging questions of women’s political struggles, migration and labour, Bedouin feminist epistemologies, cyberfeminism, legal mobilisation, anti- imperial and anti-statist feminist thought, artistic practice, and women and physical education. We welcome proposals that broaden this conceptual and empirical conversation.
Contributors are encouraged not only to analyse a particular case or phenomenon in the GCC, but to make explicit its conceptual contribution: What does the material allow us to question, reconsider, or see differently in existing feminist scholarship? Which concepts become unstable, insufficient, or require reconsideration when approached from the Gulf? Which assumptions become visible precisely because we begin from the Gulf rather than approaching it through frameworks developed elsewhere?
We particularly welcome contributions by scholars and knowledge producers based in or connected to the Gulf, as well as work that engages Arabic-language and locally produced scholarship. Contributions from different disciplinary and methodological traditions are encouraged.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit:
- a chapter title;
- an abstract of no more than 300 words;
- three keywords; and
- a short biography of the author(s).
Full chapters should be written in English and will be approximately 7,000–10,000 words, including notes and references.
Please submit proposals to the editor: Dr. Lana Sirri (l.sirri@uva.nl).
Timeline
Abstract deadline: 15 August 2026
Notification of acceptance: 15 September 2026
Full chapter deadline: 15 January 2027
Publication: June 2027
Publication and Open Access
The book will be published Open Access by Amsterdam University Press (AUP) / Central European University Press (CEUP), with funding from the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) Open Access Initiative and the Dutch Research Council (NWO), project VI.Veni.211C.042.