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ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
How to Study Gender in the Middle East
Alumni spotlight
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MAAS News (Student News) أﺧﺒﺎر اﻟﻄﻼب
By Maya Mikdashi
Visiting Scholar ﺑﺎﺣث زاﺋر
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Gender is not the study of what is evident. It is an analy-
sis of how what is evident came to be, and (crucially) came to be seen as self-evident.
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Define your object of study. Before resolving to write about gender, sexuality, or any other practice or aspect of life, subjectivity or power in the Middle East, one must first define what exactly the object of study is. Be specific. What country, region, and time period form the background picture of your study? The terms “Middle East,” “Islamic world,” and “Arab world” do not refer to the same places, peoples, or histories, but the linkages between them are crucial. Moreover, the region has always been transnational, with the nation state being a relatively new phenomenon in much of Middle East. In order to study political economy and gender in Syria, for example, one must be aware of the regional history that has produced “Syria” to begin with, as well as phenomena such as a “national” economy or political economy.
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A study of gender must take sexuality into account.
Likewise, studies of sexuality cannot be disarticulated from gender analysis. To do so would be akin to studying the politics and history of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) without reference to the ideologies, institutions, and socio-economic policies of
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Staff Updates آﺧﺮأﺧﺒﺎر the Iraqi state. Gender andاﻟﻤﻮظﻔﯿﻦ sexuality co-produce and stabilize each other. Both homosexuality and heterosexuality, for example, assume Board Member Profile ﺧﺎص ﻣﻦ اﻟﻤﺠﻠﺲ اﻷﺳﺘﺸﺎري and reproduce a gender binary.
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Gender isPublic one aspect Events اﻟﻤﻨﺎﺳﺒﺎت اﻟﻌﺎﻣﺔof individual and group subjectivity. It is also just one technology of governmentality—a
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The ungendered body does not exist, just as the unclassed body does not exist. Disarticulating the body
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a hijab is just a hijab, and sometimes it is not.
Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam Duke University Press, 2011
Hibba Abugideiri (MAAS ‘94) Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2010
Education Outreach ﺗﻌﻤﯿﻢ اﻟﺘﺜﻘﯿﻒ اﻟﺘﺮﺑﻮي
means of producing and regulating ties between the indiIn the Headlines ﻓﻲ اﻟﻌﻨﺎوﯾﻦ vidual body, populations, and structures of power and quantification. Studies of politics, history, and law must take into account gender and sexuality, just as such studies must be attentive to class, race, political economy and, crucially, how all of these factors interact.
from class and gender hides that gender is not something one can be outside of. It also reaffirms the positioning of normative male political practices as somehow “unmarked” and universal. Gender is not an analytic lens that can be withheld and deployed according to the genitalia and/or sexual practices of the people being researched. When attention to gender is limited to female and/or LGBTQ people in the Middle East, it reproduces the study of gender as the study of how (other) men treat “their” women and other members of LGBTQ communities.
Andrew Michael Ivaska (MAAS ‘95)
Dispatches ﺑﺮﻗﯿﺎت
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Avoid tokenism and broad generalizations. Sometimes
Do not assume that gender politics or feminist concerns come in neat and familiar packages. Instead, al-
low your research to expand your view of what “feminist politics” may encompass. It could mean, for example, examining protests against neoliberal market restructuring in Egypt within a broad political framework that includes notions of gender justice. As Saba Mahmood and Lila Abu Lughod have taught us, liberal feminism`s assumptions as to what constitute “feminist politics” or “feminist causes” are flawed, at best. At worst, they are exercises in epistemological hegemony and the remaking of the world according to secular and neoliberal rights frameworks. Furthermore, do not assume that what we call the “feminist canon” is exhaustive or that it is not constituted through a series of exclusions, hierarchies, and imperial histories. After all, Simone de Beauvoir, who taught us that a woman is not born but made, also wrote in terms we now recognize as “Islamophobic” about women “under” Islam in Algeria at the time when Algeria was a French settler colony. This does not mean we should dismiss de Beauvoir, just as we do not condemn all works from Hegel or Marx because of their “views” on Africa. Rather, it is crucial to critically inhabit and navigate the reality that the western canon was, and is, constituted through the production of “selves” and “others.”
مركز الدراسات العربية املعاصرة – جامعة جورجتاون
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