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Journal of Women's History 13.1 (2001) 216-234



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Asma Afsaruddin, ed. Hermeneutics and Honor: Negotiating Female "Public" Space in Islamic/ate Societies. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999. xi + 222 pp. ISBN 0-932885-21-7 (pb).

The eight essays in this volume present scholarship from the seminar on Women and Gender in the Middle East and Islamic Societies (1991-1996) from Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Afsaruddin's introduction defines such key concepts as gendered space, Islamist, and honor for Islamic/ate societies. Contributors Anan Ameri and Julie Peteet both examine Palestinian women; Ameri discusses challenges to the women's movement under the Palestinian National Authority, and Peteet argues that the dialectic of nationality creates a "discourse of somatization" that often undermines feminism. Shahla Haeri compares the political rape of Pakistan's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, with the "honor-rape" of three individual Pakistani women. Nayereh Tohidi presents the effects of Islamic and nationalist values in pre- and post-Soviet Azerbaijan on women. Virginia Danielson suggests that the transitional cultural zone of commercial consumption in twentieth-century Egypt allowed female singers to perform in public space. Leslie Peirce examines class distinctions and legal status for "respectable" and "non-respectable" women in sixteenth-century Ottoman court records. Finally, Margot Badran discusses "Islamic feminism(s)" and their multiple identities for the modern Middle East. ------Ruma Niyogi.



Beth Bailey. Sex in the Heartland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. 265 pp.; no bibliography. ISBN 0-674-80278-0 (cl).

A surprising location for a study of sexual revolution in the 1960s, Lawrence, Kansas, illustrates the significance of ordinary people to a national transformation values and norms. Bailey argues that negotiation among men and women in cities and towns nationwide enacted change as much as did countercultural radicals in urban coastal cities. The sexual revolution undermined adult authority over young people's sexuality, but only partially modified sex roles and gender hierarchies, yielding consequences that were not always liberatory for young women and men. Bailey unravels various strands of sexual revolution, including administrators' efforts to regulate student conduct, unmarried women's access to birth control pills, homosexual students' encounters with school authorities, and links between sexual revolution and Lawrence's black civil rights struggles. Extensive research in primary documents (including case records of University of Kansas students who came before administrators) and interviews provide substance to a monograph that promises to change how we think about post-World War II history of sexuality. ------Susan K. Freeman [End Page 216]



Antoinette Burton, ed. Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities. New York: Routledge, 1999. xiii + 232 pp.; ill.; no bibliography. ISBN 0-415-20068-7 (cl).

This excellent collection demonstrates how ideologies of gender and sexuality were basic to colonial notions of modernity. Exploring imperial history at a level pioneered by such authors as Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper, authors adopt a Foucauldian understanding of power. Burton calls colonial modernity an "unfinished" project, while accepting its violent and oppressive character. The approach is global, with articles by numerous international scholars and experts covering diverse locations from San Francisco's Chinatown, Canada, and Australia, to Marseilles, Indonesia, Hong Kong, India, and colonial Ceylon. Notably missing are contributions regarding Africa or the Middle East. This anthology treats colonial "modernities" (versus notions of "traditional" local cultures) as constructs to be critiqued and as an organizing principle/theme of the collection. It also examines Europeans' (mainly British) constructions of local cultures in diverse settings, emphasizing how "otherness" was fundamental to European colonial identities. Another paradox consists of replicating the dominance of European colonial regimes by critiquing it in a collection focused primarily on European colonial dominance. However, the lenses of gender and sexuality are perhaps most interesting when applied to ideologies concerning colonized women's motherhood and discourses surrounding nation, empire, tradition, modernity in colonial India and Ceylon. In such ways, we may be led back to a less Eurocentric view. ------Claire C. Robertson



Ann B. Carl. A WASP among Eagles: A Woman Military Test Pilot in World War II. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999...

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