Minoo Moallem - Böcker

Minoo Moallem challenges the mainstream stereotypical representation of Islam and Muslims as backward, fanatical, and premodern by showing how Islamic nationalism and fundamentalism are by-products of modernity. Writing with a deep personal and scholarly concern for recent Iranian history, Moallem refers to the gendered notions of brother and sister as keys to understanding the invention of the Islamic ummat as a modern fraternal community. Using magazines, novels, and films, she offers a feminist transnational analysis of contemporary Iranian culture that questions dominant binaries of modern and traditional, West and East, secular and religious, and civilized and barbaric. Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister responds to a number of important questions raised in connection with 9/11. The author considers how veiling intersects with other identity markers in nation-state building and modern formations of gendered citizenship. She shows how Islamic nationalism and fundamentalism are fed by a hybrid blend of images and myths of both pre-Islamic and Islamic Iran, as well as globally circulated patriarchal ideologies.

This volume pays tribute to the late Fatema Mernissi, a pioneering feminist sociologist and writer whose work profoundly influenced feminist and civic activism in Muslim and Arab societies and beyond. Bringing together an international group of scholars, the book explores pressing issues of women, gender, and sexuality in Muslim and Arab countries and their diasporas, engaging in a dynamic dialogue with Mernissi’s work.The collection examines Mernissi’s contributions through three key axes: her challenge to uneven transnational geopolitical power relations; her unique approach to Islamic feminism, positing compatibility between egalitarian interpretations of Islam and social justice; and her feminist decolonial approach that both deconstructs hegemonic knowledge frames and produces new forms of knowledge.With original essays by scholars of diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology, sociology, development studies, queer studies, literature, and regional studies, this volume offers fresh perspectives on Mernissi’s influential ideas. Each contributor engages with Mernissi’s work using her feminist theoretical framework, while extending it into their specific areas of scholarship.

This volume pays tribute to the late Fatema Mernissi, a pioneering feminist sociologist and writer whose work profoundly influenced feminist and civic activism in Muslim and Arab societies and beyond. Bringing together an international group of scholars, the book explores pressing issues of women, gender, and sexuality in Muslim and Arab countries and their diasporas, engaging in a dynamic dialogue with Mernissi’s work.The collection examines Mernissi’s contributions through three key axes: her challenge to uneven transnational geopolitical power relations; her unique approach to Islamic feminism, positing compatibility between egalitarian interpretations of Islam and social justice; and her feminist decolonial approach that both deconstructs hegemonic knowledge frames and produces new forms of knowledge.With original essays by scholars of diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology, sociology, development studies, queer studies, literature, and regional studies, this volume offers fresh perspectives on Mernissi’s influential ideas. Each contributor engages with Mernissi’s work using her feminist theoretical framework, while extending it into their specific areas of scholarship.

In Between Woman and Nation constructions such as nationalism, homeland, country, region, and locality are for the first time examined in the context of gender. The contributors-leading scholars of ethnicity, transnationalism, globalization, and feminist theory-are united in their determination to locate and describe the performative space of interactions between woman and nation. These are interactions, claim the contributors, that cannot be essentialized.This interdisciplinarily collection investigates women in diverse locales-ranging from Quebec to Beirut. The contributors consider such subjects as Yucatan feminism, Islamic fundamentalisms, Canadian gender formations, historic Chicana/o struggles, and Israeli/Palestinian conflicts. Divided into three parts, the collection first examines constructions of nationalism and communities whose practices complicate these constructions. The second section discusses regulations of particular nation-states and how they affect the lives of women, while the third presents studies of transnational identity formation, in which contributors critique ideas such as “multicultural nationalism” and “global feminism.” Arguing provocatively that such movements and concepts inadequately represent women’s interests, contributors examine how such beliefs and their attendant organizations may actually bolster the very formations they ought to subvert.In its demonstration of the critical possibilities of feminist alliances across discrepant and distinct material conditions, Between Woman and Nation will make a unique contribution to women’s studies, feminist theory, studies of globalization and transnationalism, ethnic studies, and cultural studies.

Persian Carpets: the Nation As a Transnational Commodity tracks the Persian carpet as an exotic and mythological object, as a commodity, and as an image from mid-nineteenth-century England to contemporary Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Following the journey of this single object, the book brings issues of labor into conversation with the politics of aesthetics. It focuses on the carpet as a commodity which crosses the boundaries of private and public, religious and secular, culture and economy, modern and traditional, home and diaspora, and art and commodity to tell the story of transnational interconnectivity.Bringing transnational feminist cultural studies, ethnography, and network studies within the same frame of reference, this book sheds light on Orientalia as civilizational objects that emerged as commodities in the encounter between the West and the many directly or indirectly colonized Middle Eastern and West Asian cultures, focusing on the specific example of Persian carpets as some of the most extensively valued and traded objects since colonial modernity.