Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging

posted on: Apr 10, 2011

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. 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 between 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.

<b>Editors</b>

Rabab Abdulhadi is associate professor of ethnic studies/race and resistance studies and senior scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative at San Francisco State University. She is the coauthor of Mobilizing Democracy: Changing U.S. Policy in the Middle East. Her work has appeared in Gender and Society, Radical History Review, Peace Review, Journal of Women’s History, Ms Magazine, The Guardian, and Palestine Focus.

Evelyn Alsultany is assistant professor in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Her articles have appeared in American Quarterly, Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11, and The Arab Diaspora.

Nadine Naber is assistant professor in the Department of Women’s Studies and the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Feminist Studies, Journal of Ethnic Studies, and Journal of Cultural Dynamics. She is a coeditor of Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11, published by Syracuse University Press.