Middle East Studies

A unique collaboration of over 900 scholars from around the world, the Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures crosses history, geographic borders and disciplines to create a ground-breaking reference work reflecting the very latest research on gender studies and the Islamic world. No other reference work offers this scale of contributions or depth and breadth of coverage.

Featuring comprehensive global coverage of women's issues and concerns, from violence and sexuality to feminist theory, the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women brings the field into the new millennium.

Contains articles on specific cultures (Tlingit, Uzbecks) and broad topical articles (Courtship and Marriage, Biological Bases of Sex Differences).

The Women's Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third Wave Feminism introduces the third wave's key issues, members, visions, writings, and more. The scope of the more than 200 encyclopedia entries is multidisciplinary and multicultural, inclusive of diverse gender orientations and sexualities.

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory provides a rich overview of the analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts that feminist theorists have developed to analyze the known world.

This book assesses the contribution of women to the Arabic novel, both in subject matter and form.

A nuanced understanding of literary imaginings of masculinity and femininity in the Arabic novel. While the 'woman question' in the Arabic novel has received considerable attention, the 'male question' has gone largely unnoticed. Gender studies in Arabic literature has become equated with women's writing, leaving aside the possibility of a radical rethinking of the Arabic literary canon and Arab cultural history. This book bucks that trend, offering a nuanced understanding of literary imaginings of masculinity and femininity in the context of the 'national' canon of Egypt.

In a century torn by violent civil uprisings, civilian bombings, and genocides, war has been an immediate experience for both soldiers and civilians, for both women and men. But has this reality changed our long-held images of the roles women and men play in war, or the emotions we attach to violence, or what we think war can accomplish? This provocative collection addresses such questions in exploring male and female experiences of war--from World War I, to Vietnam, to wars in Latin America and the Middle East--and how this experience has been articulated in literature, film and drama, history, psychology, and philosophy.

Journal of Arabic Literature, v39 n2 (2008): 270-310

Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, in Desiring Arabs Joseph A. Massad reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural heritage and civilization.  

Saṭwat al-nahār wa-siḥr al-layl : al-fuḥūlah wa-mā yuwāzīhā fī al-taṣawwur al-ʻArabī"

Woman's voice and body are closely entwined in the Arabo-Islamic tradition, argues Fedwa Malti-Douglas in this pioneering book. Spanning the ninth through twentieth centuries and covering a wide range of texts--from courtly anecdote to mystical and philosophical treatises, from works of geography to autobiography--this study reveals how woman's access to literary speech has remained mediated through her body.

Writings on gender in the Middle East have tended to focus overwhelmingly on the status of women, on the rise of Islamist politics and veiling, and on the social construction of female identity. In the process issues of male identity in a region which has seen enormous social transformations over the past thirty years have been somewhat neglected. This book looks at the process by which stereotypical male identities get constructed, reproduced and contested in different parts of the Middle East.

This book, the first full-length study of its kind, dares to probe the biggest taboo in contemporary Arab culture with scholarly intent and integrity - female homosexuality. Habib argues that female homosexuality has a long history in Arabic literature and scholarship, beginning in the ninth century, and she traces the destruction of Medieval discourses on female homosexuality and the replacement of these with a new religious orthodoxy that is no longer permissive of a variety of sexual behaviours. Habib also engages with recent "gay" historiography in the West and challenges institutionalized constructionist notions of sexuality.

This book examines how the process of nation-building in Egypt helped transform Egypt from an Ottoman province to an Arabic speaking national community. Through the discussion of the life and works of the prominent writer `A'isha Taymur, Hatem gives insight into how literature and the changing gender roles of women and men contributed to the definition and/or development of a sense of community.

This collection of essays provides a greater understanding of the history of the Gulf and the Arab world and is of relevance to Muslim women everywhere.

Despite, or even because of their tumultuous history, Palestinians are renowned for being prolific cultural producers, creating many of the Arab world's most iconic works of literature. In particular, the Palestinian short story stands out for its unique interplay between literary texts and the political and historical contexts from which they emerge.

Far from offering another study that bemoans Arab women's repression and veiling, Anxiety of Erasure looks at Arab women writers living in the diaspora who have translated their experiences into a productive and creative force. In this book, Al-Samman articulates the therapeutic effects of revisiting forgotten histories and of activating two cultural tropes: that of the maw'udah (buried female infant) and that of Shahrazad in the process of revolutionary change. She asks what it means to develop a national, gendered consciousness from diasporic locals while staying committed to the homeland.

'Islamicate Sexualities' explores different genealogies of sexuality and questions some of the theoretical emphases and epistemic assumptions affecting histories of sexuality.

The second volume of the highly acclaimed  Cairo Trilogyfrom the winner of the  Nobel Prize for Literature. Filled with compelling  drama, earthy humor, and remarkable insight,  Palace Of Desireis the unforgettable  story of the violent clash between ideals and  realities, dreams and desires.