Editorial Introduction

The focus of this issue is the gender and sexuality of borders and margins. Borders and margins are productive spaces to examine both the power and contingency of normative gender and sexual ideals and how gendered and sexual bodies participate in the production and reconfiguration of the nation-state and its territory. Metaphorical or literal bordering practices (e.g., defining the categories of belonging in a nation, whose mobility can be restricted, and whose life does not matter) may be violently repressive but also potentially generative of new forms of politics. Through an exploration of borders and margins across a variety of contexts, the articles and essays in this issue provide exciting epistemological and ontological frontiers for Middle East women’s studies. This examination of borders and margins continues the feminist and gender-based analyses of material and discursive spaces and mobilities examined in the previous issues of volume 13.

The center of our cover art design is from Rania Matar’s series A Girl and Her Room. This series captures teenage girls in the rooms they claim as their own, exploring how they occupy and constitute the borders between their most intimate spaces and the worlds around them, and raising questions about the margins between girlhood and womanhood. Through these practices of occupying and creating space, girls form their own subjectivities. Moving between girls’ rooms in the United States and the Middle East, Matar’s work also lends a critical eye toward the assumed divisions between these regions, instead drawing attention to the similarities in the affective embodiments of girlhood.

Sara Smith introduces the four articles that examine borders and margins from the perspective of gender and sexuality. Her discussion highlights how women on the margins of society expose the exclusionary and gendered logics of nation-state formation and generate new engagements with embodied politics and religious practice. Women’s bodies are not only where idealized gender norms central to the construction of the nation and state are expressed and lived but also where territory and borders of the nation-state materialize. In the current context of escalating conflict with Kurds in Turkey, Nadje Al Ali and Latif Tas’s article shows how embodied experiences of injustice and violence enable the bridging of ethnic/national divides and produce a convergence between Kurdish and Turkish women’s rights and peace activists. Hanan Hammad’s article provides an analysis of how rural and poor girls and women who find themselves excluded from the elite ideal of respectability subsist in the margins of society in interwar Egypt. Focusing on the women’s movement to build the Third Jewish Temple in the Temple Mount/Haram ash-Sharif in Jerusalem, Rachel Feldman analyzes women’s strategies for making territory through an embodied politics that relies on whiteness and normative ideals of motherhood. Finally, Farzaneh Hemmasi draws our attention to how a woman’s embodied practice of singing while wearing a headscarf onstage can become a field of explosive political and territorial debates about Islamic piety, national identity, and morality among Iranians in Iran and the diaspora. Together, the four articles analyze the role of gender and sexuality in the multiple embodied productions of borders and margins of societies, nations, and states. They reveal how women develop strategies for subsistence, acceptance, and creation of new territory, or for the complete overhaul of the systems of gendered violence, conflict, and injustice.

Our review section consists of four essays, of which three are book reviews (Brinda J. Mehta’s Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices against Violence, by Abdelkader Cheref; Brian Edwards’s After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East, by Peter Limbrick; and Madeline Otis Campbell’s Interpreters of Occupation: Gender and the Politics of Belonging in an Iraqi Refugee Network, by Vivian Solana). Asma Naeem also reviews an art exhibition, She Who Tells a Story. This exhibition includes two of the artists featured on the covers of volume 13: Gohar Dashti (13:1) and Rania Matar (the current issue).

Third Space begins with Rania Matar’s and my notes on the cover art, and continues with an essay in honor...