Preface

This Special Issue on Women in the Middle East is the result of the hard work and vision of a number of people both in the Middle East and in North America. In March 2008, the Department of Sociology and the Centre for Female Labour and Employment at Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey held a conference entitled "Women's Movements in the Middle East and Turkey: Experiences, Gains and Problems and the Socio-Cultural and Historical Processes." The conference gathered women from various parts of the Middle East including Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, and Turkey. The speakers came from a variety of societal sectors representing nonprofit/nongovernmental organizations, universities, and governments. The meeting ended with a recommendation to maintain and expand the dialogue about women in the Middle East. Ammar (the primary co-editor) of this volume suggested a publication regarding women in the Middle East in a mainstream academic Western journal. The idea is that the dialogue about Middle Eastern women needed to become integrated into the general feminist research literature instead of remaining marginalized and segregated into cultural area journals, conferences, and classes.

Ammar approached the Feminist Formations journal (which at the time was the National Women Studies Association Journal). The proposed special issue to the journal intended to provide a platform for a group of scholars and advocates from the Middle East, North America, Europe, and other regions to address issues concerning Middle Eastern women outside designated regional and cultural studies arenas. The editor of Feminist Formations, Rebecca Ropers-Huilman, was open to receiving a proposal and provided us with guidance on how to write a competitive proposal for a Special Issue. The Editorial Board of Feminist Formations approved the proposal in their general meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, in November 2009. Having Feminist Formations support a special issue that invites women studies' scholars from the Middle East and colleagues from around the globe to speak about the state of their cultural area sets a precedent and shows a commitment to reverse the publication bias that currently favors authors from North America (Donovan 2010), and/or relegates non-Western women studies into regional journals. Horton (2000), the editor of the prestigious medical journal the Lancet, notes that since journals embody the attitudes and behaviors of researchers and practitioners "the actions of editors reflect the state of the field's research" (2231). This Special Issue on Women in the Middle East is a testament that Feminist Formations' editor and Editorial Board practice their mission statement:

Feminist Formations (formerly the NWSA Journal [1988-2009]) cultivates a forum where feminists from around the world articulate research, theory, activism, teaching, and learning, thereby showcasing new feminist formations.

This Special Issue on Middle Eastern women is the result of feminism without borders. This is a feminism that empowers women regardless of national origin, race, ethnicity, or religion but at the same time allows for expressing the intersectionality of these forces to better understand social, political, economic, and historical processes impacting the lives of women. It is a feminism that is not blind to or afraid of difference but embraces it to provide a more holistic picture of the conditions of women's lives. It is a feminism that does not frame understanding women from the Middle East through a reversal process—that is, they are what Western women are not (Marriscotti 2008, 10-11)—nor by denying them their feminist subjectivity (Ong 1988, 79-93), nor by essentializing their culture as timeless and unchanging.

The readers of this Special Issue will recognize the running themes of patriarchy, identity, change, education, employment, resistance, globalization, immigrants, and occupation. All these themes are part of the issues, debates, and priorities for Middle Eastern women and their societies. The authors explore the themes in their complexity and engage in a critique of gender that takes into account the multiple aspects of women's identities that are influenced by other dimensions such as poverty, social justice, political totalitarianism, cultural traditions, aesthetics, and technology.

This Special Issue is not intended, nor does it claim, to be a comprehensive volume on Women in the Middle East. Nevertheless, its...