"While several chapters feel crucial to current discussions of transnational feminist solidarity—Mohja Kahf’s ‘Pity Committee and the Careful Reader’ and an interview with Ella Shohat—the book’s approach and value is perhaps most visible in one of its more striking essays, Amal Amireh’s ‘Palestinian Women’s Disappearing Act: The Suicide Bomber Through Western Feminist Eyes.’"—Women's Studies Quarterly
"A dynamic and multifaceted as well as intimate narrative of the ‘pattern of rising xenophobia against Arabs and Muslims in the post-September 11, 2001, United States.’"—Choice
Description
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 among Arab communities. 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 among 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.
About the Author
Rabab Abdulhadi is associate professor of ethnic studies and senior scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative at San Francisco State University.
Evelyn Alsultany is assistant professor in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan.
Nadine Naber is assistant professor in the Department of Women’s Studies and the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan.
Related Interest
April 2015