In this Book
- Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging
- Book
- 2011
- Published by: Syracuse University Press
- Series: Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East
In this collection, Arab and Arab American feminists enlist their intimate experiences to challenge simplistic and long-held assumptions about gender, sexuality, and commitments to feminism and justice-centered struggles among Arab communities. Contributors hail from multiple geographical sites, spiritualities, occupations, sexualities, class backgrounds, and generations. Poets, creative writers, artists, scholars, and activists employ a mix of genres to express feminist issues and highlight how Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives simultaneously inhabit multiple, overlapping, and intersecting spaces: within families and communities; in anticolonial and antiracist struggles; in debates over spirituality and the divine; within radical, feminist, and queer spaces; in academia and on the street; and among each other.
Contributors explore themes as diverse as the intersections between gender, sexuality, Orientalism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism, and the restoration of Arab Jews to Arab American histories. This book asks how members of diasporic communities navigate their sense of belonging when the country in which they live wages wars in the lands of their ancestors. Arab and Arab American Feminisms opens up new possibilities for placing grounded Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives at the center of gender studies, Middle East studies, American studies, and ethnic studies.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-xii
- List of Contributors
- pp. xiii-xviii
- Arab and Arab American Feminisms: An Introduction
- pp. xix-xxxix
- Part 1. Living with/in Empire: Grounded Subjectivities
- 1. Beyond Words
- pp. 3-9
- Part 2. Defying Categories: Thinking and Living Out of the Box
- 8. Between the Lines
- pp. 95-96
- 9. Quandaries of Representation
- pp. 97-103
- Part 3. Activist Communities: Representation, Resistance, and Power
- 18. Just Peace Seder
- pp. 203-212
- Part 4. On Our Own Terms: Discourses, Politics, and Feminisms
- 24. The Light in My House
- pp. 270-273
- 25. Guidelines
- pp. 274-275
- Part 5. Home and Homelands: Memories, Exile, and Belonging
- 27. The Memory of Your Hands Is a Rainbow
- pp. 283-287
- 29. The Long Road Home
- pp. 292-301
- 30. The Legacy of Exile: An Excerpt
- pp. 302-306
- 31. Stealth Muslim
- pp. 307-314
- Bibliography
- pp. 361-381