Shahd Alshammari – författare

This edited volume investigates how Gulf women negotiate spaces of dissent through their writing. The focus on women’s narratives offers critical perspectives on how women in the Gulf construct themselves as gendered selves and authors, how they exist within public and private spaces, and how voice and agency are part of their conversations in various spheres. In the process, the book engages readers in theoretical reflections and conversations with literary works, media, the law, disability studies, and oral narratives from the Gulf.This timely volume fills in a serious gap in research and contributes to countering stereotypes and prejudices about Muslim and Arab women, specifically those located in the Arabian Gulf. The chapters gathered here challenge narratives of submissiveness, powerlessness, and victimization in order to uncover women’s social, cultural, and political contributions in their countries of origin or residence.The editors and contributors are specialists of the area, with the majority of them being from the Gulf. They include scholars and students, practitioners and entrepreneurs, all writing from a position of insight that stems from long-term engagement with the region. This offers a wide range of voices and perspectives that enrich the volume with a variety of topics, methodologies, and formats. This multidisciplinarity makes for the book’s broad appeal to the general reading public as well as specialists, practitioners, members of the press and civil society, as well as policymakers. This volume will also be a valuable resource to international audiences with an interest in the region.

Head Above Water is a professor's moving account of being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at just eighteen in a conservative Kuwaiti society, drawing from her diary entries and fading memories as the disease advances.“Shahd Alshammari’s sensuous prose explores the manipulation of memory, the question of time, and gender politics. We are invited to reconsider the intricacies of love, the body, motherhood, the pervasive power of language, the power of women’s education, and the synergy between the Professor and the student.”—Jokha Alharthi Omani author of Celestial bodies, winner of the International Man Booker Prize (2019)“Reading Alshammari’s work, I thought continually of Yeats’s famous line, “a terrible beauty is born.” In this book, illness is that terrible beauty, always affecting but never determining the author’s life.”—Arthur W. Frank, Ph.D. Author of At the Will of the Body and The Wounded Storyteller“An important piece of life writing - Shahd Alshammari’s memoir breaks new ground in representing the lives of disabled Arab women. Exploring connections between the body, language, and culture, Alshammari’s new memoir is a sensitive and moving invitation to reconsider the stories that we are made of.” —Dr. Roxanne Douglas, University of Warwick“A necessary and beautiful account of life with a sometimes-invisible and unpredictable disability, complicated by both patriarchy and racism, as well as a professor’s love letter to the act of teaching and being taught.”—Marcia Lynx Qualey (@Arablit)

Head Above Water takes us into a space of intimate conversations on illness and society's stigmatization of disabled bodies. We are invited in to ask the big questions about life, loss, and the place of the other. The narrative builds a bridge that reminds us of common humanity and weaves the threads that tie us all together.