Browsing by Subject "Women's Studies"
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Item Open Access Bargaining with the devil: States and intimate life(Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2014-01-01) Hasso, FSSince the 1980s, an explosion in state, international, and nongovernmental campaigns and programs propose to increase women's rights and protections in Arab countries. Women and women's rights activists often invite and appeal to male-dominated states to regulate, intervene, or change the rules in sexual and family life in order to address a range of problems and challenges, including lack of economic and other resources, political and citizenship exclusions, or intimate violence. What are the implications of relying on states as the main arbiters of rights and protections This is a longstanding feminist question whose answer hinges on underlying assumptions and theories about states and governance. Reliance on states as the primary sources of protection and support in intimate life has largely worked to rearticulate gendered, economic, and other inequitable power relations, bolster states, reconstitute state authority over intimate domains, and limit possibilities for gendered, sexual, and kin subjectivities and affinities. This dynamic may be metaphorically described as a "devil's bargain" since state-delivered rights and protections in these realms are so often attached to important restrictions and foreclosures. The article conceptually and theoretically expands on my research on family law projects in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates in Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2011). Its title is inspired by Deniz Kandiyoti's influential article, "Bargaining with Patriarchy" (Gender & Society, 1988), which I re-engage for analytical purposes. © 2014 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies.Item Open Access Cover Art Concept(Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2018-03-01) Hasso, FSItem Open Access Discursive and political deployments by/of the 2002 Palestinian women suicide bombers/martyrs(Feminist Review, 2005-11-01) Hasso, FSThis paper focuses on representations by and deployments of the four Palestinian women who during the first four months of 2002 killed themselves in organized attacks against Israeli military personnel or civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories or Israel. The paper addresses the manner in which these militant women produced and situated themselves as gendered-political subjects, and argues that their self-representations and acts were deployed by individuals and groups in the region to reflect and articulate other gendered-political subjectivities that at times undermined or rearticulated patriarchal religio-nationalist understandings of gender and women in relation to corporeality, authenticity, and community. The data analysed include photographs, narrative representations in television and newspaper media, the messages the women left behind, and secondary sources. © 2005 Feminist Review.Item Open Access Displacement, War, and Exile in Simone Fattal’s Works and Days(Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2020-03-01) Cooke, MItem Open Access Editorial Introduction(Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2018-03-01) Hasso, FSItem Open Access Entering and remaking spaces: Young palestinian feminists in Jerusalem(Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2017-07-01) Hasso, FSItem Open Access Eve’s Triangles: Queer Studies Beside Itself(Differences, 2015-01-26) Wiegman, RResponding to the theme of the special issue, Queer Theory without Antinormativity, “Eve’s Triangles” returns to the work of one of queer theory’s most important foundational figures to consider critical sensibilities that are incompatible with the dyadic approach to power and politics now institutionalized in queer studies under the rubric of antinormativity. By focusing on Sedgwick’s appetite for incoherence, the double bind, and nondialectical understandings of contradiction, this essay studies the elegant and cogent model of reading found in Sedgwick’s work in order to value queer critical intuitions that have been subordinated to antinormativity’s allure.Item Open Access Generations(Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2018-11-01) Hasso, FSItem Open Access Introduction: Antinormativity's Queer Conventions(differences, 2015-01-26) Wiegman, R; Wilson, EACan queer theory proceed without an allegiance to antinormativity? The introduction to this special issue establishes the value of this question by staging an encounter with the most widely held assumption in queer theory today: that the political value of the field lies in its antinormative commitments. The first section of this introduction demonstrates how profoundly the history of queer theorizing has been shaped by an antinormative sensibility, one that has organized the multiple and at times discordant itineraries of analysis that comprise the queer theoretical archive into a field-forming synthesis. In part 2, the authors offer a more studied consideration of the character of norms. By articulating the difference between a norm and the terms that often define it—domination, homogenization, exclusion, hegemony, identity, or more colloquially, the familiar, status quo, or routine—this section demonstrates the importance of renewing queer theoretical attention to the conceptual and political particularity of normativity as a distinct object of inquiry. The authors’ aim is not to dismiss the political agenda that antinormativity has come to represent for queer inquiry, but to channel some of the field’s energies toward analyzing the critical authority it now wields. This entails promoting scholarship that not only rethinks the meaning of norms, normalization, and the normal but that also imagines new ways to approach the politics of queer criticism altogether. In the final section, the authors describe the specific contribution of each of the volume’s essays to this endeavor.Item Open Access Introduction: Now, not now(Differences, 2019-01-01) Wiegman, RItem Open Access Masculine love and sensuous reason: the affective and spatial politics of Egyptian Ultras football fans(Gender, Place and Culture, 2018-10-03) Hasso, FS© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article uses a feminist spatial approach attentive to masculine affect and difference to analyze the language, cultural production, and practices of the two largest Ultras football fan groups in Egypt–White Knights (affiliated with Zamalek Sporting Club) and Ahlawy (affiliated with Al-Ahly Sporting Club)–both established in 2007. Egyptian Ultras cultivate embodied passion, joy, love and anger. By excluding girls and women, the Ultras reflect the sexism that permeates Egyptian social and political life. However, sexism does not appear to be the most important reason for Ultras homosociality and misogyny is not particularly relevant to their practices and cultural oeuvre. The Ultras do not encourage sexual attacks on girls and women, let alone boys and men, and explicitly discourage sectarianism and racism. Ultras groups in Egypt, I contend, offer a masculine alternative to a government that represents itself as a militarist ‘factory of men’. As they battle state efforts to control space and reinforce the dominant order, their practices challenge rationality/affect and mind/body binaries, as well as divisions between street/stadium and corporate/commons. Informed by fieldwork in Egypt, the article uses semiotic and discursive methods to analyze hundreds of Ultras’ images, songs, chants, Facebook pages, and live performances on multiple sites, as well as scholarly sources in Arabic and English and a book-length Arabic account about the Ultras in Egypt by the founder of the Ultras White Knights.Item Open Access The Times We're In: Queer Feminist Criticism and the Reparative 'Turn'(Feminist Theory, 2013) Wiegman, RThis article examines the reparative turn in current queer feminist scholarship by tracking its twin interest in the study of affect and time. By foregrounding Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's influential critique of what she called paranoid reading, I am interested in the ways that various critics - Ann Cvetkovich, Heather Love, and Elizabeth Freeman in particular - take up the call for reparative reading by using the temporal frameworks of the everyday, backward feeling, and queer time to reparative ends. In the process, I consider the reparative work being done to reclaim Sedgwick as a major thinker for queer feminist concerns, and speculate on the attraction, in a time of declining economic and cultural support for the interpretative humanities, of a critical practice that seeks to love and nurture its objects of study. © The Author(s) 2014.Item Open Access Toward an understanding of gendered agency in contemporary Russia(Signs, 2013-03-05) Holmgren, BAssessments of Russian women's current social and political status must take into account the complicated legacy of Soviet women's "emancipation." Although the Soviet government enforced women's access to higher education and a broad array of professional opportunities, it never challenged traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, or the double burden tacitly assigned women. It did not invest in products and services that would have eased "women's work" as homemakers and caretakers, nor did it protect women from sexual harassment on the job. The transition years have bared, glorified, and globalized the patriarchal state that lay just beneath the socialist veneer of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Putin government has repackaged that patriarchy as conventionally and commercially masculinist. Women do exercise some power as consumers and mothers; they seek other-than-material fulfillment in facilitating positions rather than face opprobrium as public leaders. Some are attempting to scout new forms of agency as managers and business entrepreneurs. Yet there is no straightforward upward ladder for women in work and no generally acceptable movement toward lobbying for women's rights. The women who wield the greatest sociopolitical influence in Russia today are media pundits, writers of serious literature, and journalists who combine writing with general social and political activism. In order to bridge the great divide in historical conditioning and contemporary circumstance that separates us from Russian women, we must work toward a better understanding of their complex forms of agency. © 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.