Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance

Maha El Said is a professor at the English Department, Cairo University. She has more than 22 years of experience teaching at Egyptian universities with a special interest in American studies. She was the first to write a book-length dissertation on Arab-American poetry, in 1997. She has published on Arab-American writings, creative writing, popular culture and the impact of new technologies on literature. In 2003-2004 she was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where she researched the development of the spoken word as political expression.Lena Meari is an assistant professor at the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department and the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University, Palestine. Her teaching, research interests and writing focus on settler colonialism in Palestine and formations of revolutionary movements, subjectivities, gender relations and development.Nicola Pratt is reader in the international politics of the Middle East at University of Warwick. She has been researching and writing about Middle East politics since the end of the 1990s and is particularly interested in feminist approaches as well as ‘politics from below’. Her work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, Third World Quarterly, Review of International Studies and Review of International Political Economy, amongst others. She is author of Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Arab World, co-author (with Nadje Al-Ali) of What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq and co-editor (with Sophie Richter-Devroe) of Gender, Governance and International Security and (with Nadje Al-Ali) Women and War in the Middle East. Between 2010 and 2013, she was co-director of the ‘Reconceptualising Gender: Transnational Perspectives’ research network with Birzeit University, Palestine.

• Introduction: Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance in the Arab World - Maha El Said, Lena Meari and Nicola PrattPart 1 The Malleability of Gender and Sexuality in Revolutions and Resistance1. Reconstructing Gender in Post-revolutionary Egypt - Shereen Abouelnaga2. Re-signifying 'Sexual' Colonial Power Techniques: The Experiences of Palestinian Women Political Prisoners - Lena Meari3. A Strategic Use of Culture: Egyptian Women's Subversion and Resignification of Gender Norms - Hala G. SamiPart 2 The Body and Resistance4. She Resists: Body Politics Between Radical and Subaltern - Maha El-Said5. Framing the Female Body: Beyond Morality and Pathology? - Abeer Al-Najjar and Anoud Abusalim6. Women's Bodies in Post-Revolution Libya: Control and Resistance - Sahar Mediha Elnaas and Nicola PrattPart 3 Gender and the Construction of the Secular/Islamist Binary7. Islamic Feminism and the Equivocation of Political Engagement: 'Fair is Foul, and Foul is Fair' - Omaima Abou-Bakr8. Islamic and Secular Women's Activism and Discourses in Post-uprising Tunisia - Aitemad MuhannaConclusion: Towards New Epistemologies and Ontologies of Gender and Socio-Political Transformation in the Arab World - Maha El Said, Lena Meari and Nicola Pratt

Complicating our understanding of the gendered genealogies and contours of resistance in the Arab world, Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance challenges dominant periodizations of revolutions in the region, mapping a new and persuasive historiography of deeply feminist concerns. An important and original contribution to transnational, postcolonial feminist scholarship.