Remaking Women

by Abu-Lughod, Lila

• ISBN13: 9780691057927
• ISBN10: 0691057923
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-07-01
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Contrary to popular perceptions, newly veiled women across the Middle East are just as much products and symbols of modernity as the upper- and middle-class women who courageously took off the veil almost a century ago. To make this point, these essays focus on the "woman question" in the Middle East (most particularly in Egypt and Iran), especially at the turn of the century, when gender became a highly charged nationalist issue tied up in complex ways with the West. The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary burst of energy and richness in Middle East women's studies, and the contributors to this volume exemplify the vitality of this new thinking. They take up issues of concern to historians and social thinkers working on the postcolonial world. The essays challenge the assumptions of other major works on women and feminism in the Middle East by questioning, among other things, the familiar dichotomy in which women's domesticity is associated with tradition and modernity with their entry into the public sphere. Indeed,Remaking Womenis a radical challenge to any easy equation of modernity with progress, emancipation, and the empowerment of women. The contributors are Lila Abu-Lughod, Marilyn Booth, Deniz Kandiyoti, Khaled Fahmy, Mervat Hatem, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Omnia Shakry, and Zohreh T. Sullivan.The book is introduced by the editor with a piece called "Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions," which masterfully interfaces the critical studies of feminism and modernism with scholarship on South Asia and the Middle East.

Author Biography

Lila Abu-Lughod is Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at New York University

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Note on Transliterations	xi
Introduction Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions	3	(30)
Lila Abu-Lughod
PART ONE: REWRITING FEMINIST BEGINNINGS: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY	33	(56)
Women, Medicine, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Egypt	35	(38)
Khaled Fahmy
`A'isha Taymur's Tears and the Critique of the Modernist and the Feminist Discourses on Nineteenth-Century Egypt	73	(16)
Mervat Hatem
PART TWO: MOTHERS, WIVES, AND CITIZENS: THE TURN OF THE CENTURY	89	(124)
Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran	91	(35)
Afsaneh Najmabadi
Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt	126	(45)
Omnia Shakry
The Egyptian Lives of Jeanne d'Arc	171	(42)
Marilyn Booth
PART THREE: ISLAMISM, MODERNISM, AND FEMINISMS: THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY	213	(57)
Eluding the Feminist, Overthrowing the Modern? Transformations in Twentieth-Century Iran	215	(28)
Zohreh T. Sullivan
The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt: Selective Repudiation as a Dynamic of Postcolonial Cultural Politics	243	(27)
Lila Abu-Lughod
Afterword Some Awkward Questions on Women and Modernity in Turkey	270	(19)
Deniz Kandiyoti
Contributors	289	(2)
Index	291