Lucia Sorbera – författare

Legitimacy, along with security and democracy, is arguably one of the most widely used global buzzwords of the new millennium. Yet, the idea of political legitimacy is not new and has been constructed in different ways at different moments in history. This book problematizes this notion, from various contextual standpoints, disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Taking a comparative, transnational and bottom-up approach to the study of political legitimacy, this book sheds light on multiple perceptions by different actors (institutions, civil society, majoritarian and minority subjects), analysing the notion of political legitimacy from a critical perspective. Questioning received wisdom or one-size-fits-all analyses, it leads to a reassessment of the link between legitimacy and sovereignty, and emphasises the demand by transnational civil society to go beyond identity politics, which produce logics of violence. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Discourse.

It is not Egypt's 2011 revolution that opened a space for women's and feminist activism, but—as this book shows—the long history of women's activism that created the intellectual and political background for revolution. By centering the experiences and ideas of multiple generations of women activists and intellectuals, Lucia Sorbera traces the feminist genealogies of Egypt's nationalist, student, Marxist, labor, human rights, and democratic social movements. Biography of a Revolution gathers a series of interrelated intimate and relational stories, charting in vivid detail the entanglements between women's aspirations across a century of politics and friendships. This historical analysis innovatively deploys decolonial and indigenous feminist epistemologies, bringing women's, gender, and feminist history into the center of Egypt's political, social, and intellectual history. More than a decade after the 2013 military coup, women's intellectual and political activism remains crucial to keeping the embers of revolution aglow.

It is not Egypt's 2011 revolution that opened a space for women's and feminist activism, but—as this book shows—the long history of women's activism that created the intellectual and political background for revolution. By centering the experiences and ideas of multiple generations of women activists and intellectuals, Lucia Sorbera traces the feminist genealogies of Egypt's nationalist, student, Marxist, labor, human rights, and democratic social movements. Biography of a Revolution gathers a series of interrelated intimate and relational stories, charting in vivid detail the entanglements between women's aspirations across a century of politics and friendships. This historical analysis innovatively deploys decolonial and indigenous feminist epistemologies, bringing women's, gender, and feminist history into the center of Egypt's political, social, and intellectual history. More than a decade after the 2013 military coup, women's intellectual and political activism remains crucial to keeping the embers of revolution aglow.

What have different ideas about sex and gender meant for people throughout the history of the Middle East and North Africa? This book traces sex and desire in Muslim cultures through a collection of chapters that span the 9th to 21st centuries. Looking at spaces and periods where sexual norms and the categories underpinning them emerge out of multiple subjectivities, the book shows how people constantly negotiate the formulation of norms, their boundaries and their subversion. It demonstrates that the cultural and political meanings of sexualities in Muslim cultures - as elsewhere – emerge from very specific social and historical contexts.The first part of the book examines how people constructed, discussed and challenged sexual norms from the Abbasid to the Ottoman period. The second part looks at literary and cinematic Arab cultural production as a site for the construction and transgression of gender norms. The third part builds on feminist historiography and social anthropology to question simplistic dichotomies and binaries. Each of the contributions shows how understanding of sexualities and the subjectivities that evolve from them are rooted in the mutually-constitutive relationships between gender and political power. In identifying the plurality of discourses on desires, the book goes beyond the dichotomy of norm and transgression to glimpse what different sexual norms have meant at different times across the Middle East.

Legitimacy, along with security and democracy, is arguably one of the most widely used global buzzwords of the new millennium. Yet, the idea of political legitimacy is not new and has been constructed in different ways at different moments in history. This book problematizes this notion, from various contextual standpoints, disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Taking a comparative, transnational and bottom-up approach to the study of political legitimacy, this book sheds light on multiple perceptions by different actors (institutions, civil society, majoritarian and minority subjects), analysing the notion of political legitimacy from a critical perspective. Questioning received wisdom or one-size-fits-all analyses, it leads to a reassessment of the link between legitimacy and sovereignty, and emphasises the demand by transnational civil society to go beyond identity politics, which produce logics of violence. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Discourse.