Pub Date : 2023-10-30DOI: 10.1215/15525864-10815511
Nadje Al-Ali, Mashuq Kurt
Abstract This article explores the complex and intersectional identities and positionalities of Kurdish Islamist women activists in Turkey in the context of heightened violence and tensions linked to the ongoing Turkish-Kurdish conflict. While both female Islamist activists and Kurdish activists in Turkey and the wider region have been subject to in-depth research over the past decade, Kurdish Islamist women have largely been overlooked in the literature. The article focuses on the complex relationship between ethnicity and religion in understanding Kurdish Islamist women’s mobilization, political views, perceptions of gender norms and relations, and self-ascribed identities. Based on original empirical research carried out in southeastern Turkey in 2015 and 2018, the article engages with the relevant literature on Islamist women’s mobilization, particularly in relation to Turkey, to complicate discourses of empowerment and critiques of liberal notions of agency while also challenging prevailing depictions of Kurdish women’s mobilization. It pays attention both to the intersecting power configurations enabling and challenging Kurdish Islamist women’s everyday lives and political engagement, and to changing political economy locally, nationally, and transnationally.
{"title":"From Islamists to Religious Patriots","authors":"Nadje Al-Ali, Mashuq Kurt","doi":"10.1215/15525864-10815511","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15525864-10815511","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the complex and intersectional identities and positionalities of Kurdish Islamist women activists in Turkey in the context of heightened violence and tensions linked to the ongoing Turkish-Kurdish conflict. While both female Islamist activists and Kurdish activists in Turkey and the wider region have been subject to in-depth research over the past decade, Kurdish Islamist women have largely been overlooked in the literature. The article focuses on the complex relationship between ethnicity and religion in understanding Kurdish Islamist women’s mobilization, political views, perceptions of gender norms and relations, and self-ascribed identities. Based on original empirical research carried out in southeastern Turkey in 2015 and 2018, the article engages with the relevant literature on Islamist women’s mobilization, particularly in relation to Turkey, to complicate discourses of empowerment and critiques of liberal notions of agency while also challenging prevailing depictions of Kurdish women’s mobilization. It pays attention both to the intersecting power configurations enabling and challenging Kurdish Islamist women’s everyday lives and political engagement, and to changing political economy locally, nationally, and transnationally.","PeriodicalId":45155,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Middle East Womens Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136067709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-30DOI: 10.1215/15525864-10815483
Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė
Abstract While literature produced by Arab women has received sustained academic attention, little commentary exists on the way fiction writing is interspersed with their ordinary lives defined by domesticity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2020 in Cairo, this article explores fiction writing as a powerful means of midlife self-reinvention among Cairene women. It considers their pursuit of literary careers in light of the recent opening of Egyptian literary markets to new writing publics and as part of women’s midlife transition, defined by their emancipation from outdated versions of their gendered selves. Viewing writing as an embodied practice of self-care, the article argues that fiction provides individuals with an “elsewhere” in which they can escape their rigid selves and reimagine their existence.
{"title":"Women Writing in Cairo","authors":"Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė","doi":"10.1215/15525864-10815483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15525864-10815483","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While literature produced by Arab women has received sustained academic attention, little commentary exists on the way fiction writing is interspersed with their ordinary lives defined by domesticity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2020 in Cairo, this article explores fiction writing as a powerful means of midlife self-reinvention among Cairene women. It considers their pursuit of literary careers in light of the recent opening of Egyptian literary markets to new writing publics and as part of women’s midlife transition, defined by their emancipation from outdated versions of their gendered selves. Viewing writing as an embodied practice of self-care, the article argues that fiction provides individuals with an “elsewhere” in which they can escape their rigid selves and reimagine their existence.","PeriodicalId":45155,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Middle East Womens Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136067951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-30DOI: 10.1215/15525864-10815623
Rojbin Ekinci
{"title":"Cover Art Concept","authors":"Rojbin Ekinci","doi":"10.1215/15525864-10815623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15525864-10815623","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45155,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Middle East Womens Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136104586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-30DOI: 10.1215/15525864-10815469
Susanna Ferguson
Abstract In 1874–75 American Protestant missionaries in Beirut published two astronomy textbooks in Arabic. While male students at the Syrian Protestant College studied Cornelius Van Dyck’s Foundations of Astronomy, girls at secondary schools—the highest level of female education—studied Eliza Everett’s Principles of Astronomy: For Use in Schools. These texts appeared at the height of a cross-cultural encounter between American Protestants and the inhabitants of Beirut and Mount Lebanon that added new meanings to the Arabic concept of science (ʿilm). Historians have analyzed men’s discussions to chart how ʿilm, once a broad category akin to “knowledge” in English, came to include a neo-Baconian understanding of the modern English “science.” This article turns to science pedagogy, a field that included both men and women, to argue that the conceptual transformation of ʿilm also entailed an epistemological division along lines of gender and age. Overall, the story reveals how a study of women in science sheds light on the gendered history of science in Arabic.
{"title":"Astronomy for Girls","authors":"Susanna Ferguson","doi":"10.1215/15525864-10815469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15525864-10815469","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 1874–75 American Protestant missionaries in Beirut published two astronomy textbooks in Arabic. While male students at the Syrian Protestant College studied Cornelius Van Dyck’s Foundations of Astronomy, girls at secondary schools—the highest level of female education—studied Eliza Everett’s Principles of Astronomy: For Use in Schools. These texts appeared at the height of a cross-cultural encounter between American Protestants and the inhabitants of Beirut and Mount Lebanon that added new meanings to the Arabic concept of science (ʿilm). Historians have analyzed men’s discussions to chart how ʿilm, once a broad category akin to “knowledge” in English, came to include a neo-Baconian understanding of the modern English “science.” This article turns to science pedagogy, a field that included both men and women, to argue that the conceptual transformation of ʿilm also entailed an epistemological division along lines of gender and age. Overall, the story reveals how a study of women in science sheds light on the gendered history of science in Arabic.","PeriodicalId":45155,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Middle East Womens Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136103631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-30DOI: 10.1215/15525864-10815525
Seda Saluk
Abstract This article examines the discourses and strategies used by reproductive rights activists in Turkey to counter the state’s antiabortion policies. Drawing on a critical genealogical analysis, the article first traces the concept of “bodily autonomy” in feminist mobilizations against sexual and ethnoracial violence from the 1980s to the first decade of the 2000s. It then focuses on the slogan of the 2012 abortion rights mobilizations, “My body, my decision!,” which relies on bodily autonomy as the central trope of claim making. The article argues that the slogan is limited, not because it draws on a liberal, individualistic framework but because it represents the bodily autonomy of the white reproductive subject, assuming that it is an ethnoracially unmarked, universal subject. In doing so, the article demonstrates how feminist strategies that build on bodily autonomy obscure the state’s stratified reproductive policies, which have historically promoted a Turkish majority at the expense of non-Turkish lives.
{"title":"“My Body, My Decision!”","authors":"Seda Saluk","doi":"10.1215/15525864-10815525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15525864-10815525","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the discourses and strategies used by reproductive rights activists in Turkey to counter the state’s antiabortion policies. Drawing on a critical genealogical analysis, the article first traces the concept of “bodily autonomy” in feminist mobilizations against sexual and ethnoracial violence from the 1980s to the first decade of the 2000s. It then focuses on the slogan of the 2012 abortion rights mobilizations, “My body, my decision!,” which relies on bodily autonomy as the central trope of claim making. The article argues that the slogan is limited, not because it draws on a liberal, individualistic framework but because it represents the bodily autonomy of the white reproductive subject, assuming that it is an ethnoracially unmarked, universal subject. In doing so, the article demonstrates how feminist strategies that build on bodily autonomy obscure the state’s stratified reproductive policies, which have historically promoted a Turkish majority at the expense of non-Turkish lives.","PeriodicalId":45155,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Middle East Womens Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136104394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-30DOI: 10.1215/15525864-10815497
Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar, Hoda Niknezhad-Ferdos
Abstract Women’s bodily experiences, radically stigmatized in Persian culture, have barely been approached in the literature of Iran. However, Rosa Jamali, an eminent postmodern poet in contemporary Iran, mobilizes her poetic palette with a phenomenological perception of pain and pleasure in the female body as a means of self-expression. For her, the female body can be portrayed via indirection and insinuation through which bodily dys-appearance (pain) and eu-appearance (pleasure) are invoked. Resonating with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of “body-subject” alongside Farzaneh Milani’s “neotraditional feminism,” Jamali’s oeuvre conceptualizes the body of a Persian woman in proximity to deeply entrenched values in Persian culture so as to transgress them. By displaying a poetic performance of intercorporeality, Jamali encounters the inscrutable female body and draws it within the contours of manifold intersomatic connections with the surrounding world, cultural memories, and archetypal images.
{"title":"The Body in Pain and Pleasure","authors":"Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar, Hoda Niknezhad-Ferdos","doi":"10.1215/15525864-10815497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15525864-10815497","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Women’s bodily experiences, radically stigmatized in Persian culture, have barely been approached in the literature of Iran. However, Rosa Jamali, an eminent postmodern poet in contemporary Iran, mobilizes her poetic palette with a phenomenological perception of pain and pleasure in the female body as a means of self-expression. For her, the female body can be portrayed via indirection and insinuation through which bodily dys-appearance (pain) and eu-appearance (pleasure) are invoked. Resonating with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of “body-subject” alongside Farzaneh Milani’s “neotraditional feminism,” Jamali’s oeuvre conceptualizes the body of a Persian woman in proximity to deeply entrenched values in Persian culture so as to transgress them. By displaying a poetic performance of intercorporeality, Jamali encounters the inscrutable female body and draws it within the contours of manifold intersomatic connections with the surrounding world, cultural memories, and archetypal images.","PeriodicalId":45155,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Middle East Womens Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136067379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-30DOI: 10.1215/15525864-10815539
Zahra Ali
Abstract This article explores the meaning and significance of the political in the October 2019 uprising in Iraq, commonly called Thawra Teshreen, through the lens of gender, space, and emancipation. It looks at the spatiality of the protests, considering both discursive and material dimensions and centering the experience of the gendered body. At the same time, it breaks with binary lenses of agency and resistance and with preconceived and universalist notions of rights and claims to representation, instead proposing a situational understanding of power and subjectivation. The article analyzes the gendered and sexual dimensions of Thawra Teshreen and explores the discursive, material, and imaginary space production through the massive corporeal presence in the streets and cybermobilization. It shows that protesters have put forward their own politics of life and death in mobilizing against the political, structural, and infrastructural forces of death that shape their experiences. It argues that women’s participation constitutes an emancipated subjectivation that goes beyond the identitarian.
{"title":"The Political in Iraq’s Thawra Teshreen","authors":"Zahra Ali","doi":"10.1215/15525864-10815539","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15525864-10815539","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the meaning and significance of the political in the October 2019 uprising in Iraq, commonly called Thawra Teshreen, through the lens of gender, space, and emancipation. It looks at the spatiality of the protests, considering both discursive and material dimensions and centering the experience of the gendered body. At the same time, it breaks with binary lenses of agency and resistance and with preconceived and universalist notions of rights and claims to representation, instead proposing a situational understanding of power and subjectivation. The article analyzes the gendered and sexual dimensions of Thawra Teshreen and explores the discursive, material, and imaginary space production through the massive corporeal presence in the streets and cybermobilization. It shows that protesters have put forward their own politics of life and death in mobilizing against the political, structural, and infrastructural forces of death that shape their experiences. It argues that women’s participation constitutes an emancipated subjectivation that goes beyond the identitarian.","PeriodicalId":45155,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Middle East Womens Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136104593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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