With Nadje Al-Ali, Deniz Kandiyoti, Kathryn Spellman Poots
Monday November 11th 6:30 pm

Compiled against a global backdrop of mounting culture wars in the realms of gender, family, and sexuality, Gender, Governance and Islamaims to unsettle and interrogate the key conceptual categories through which the politics of gender in Muslim majority countries and Muslim diasporas have been commonly apprehended. It does so through finely-grained analyses of a continuum of cases: fragmented societies that are in the grip of ongoing conflict such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine (that are characterized by more direct interventions by global governance institutions), Pakistan that has been directly affected by conflict, Turkey and Egypt that have undergone popular unrest and regime change and the “Islamic” regimes in Saudi Arabia and Iran that have undergone major transformations. The particular alignments of changing geo-politics, the inroads made by international gender platforms, their instrumental use (and misuse) by power holders, the stakes of diverse Islamic actors in the politics of gender and patterns of grass-roots mobilization and resistance are illustrated with reference to selected cases. Efforts to enforce gender hierarchies and uphold male entitlement on the one hand, and diverse patterns of grassroots resistance and (periodic accommodation by power holders), on the other, cut across all cases.

A key conclusion is that this is a uniquely productive moment to de-Orientalize scholarship on gender in Muslim societies by breaking the shackles of lingering binaries such as tradition/modernity, Islam/secularism, imperialism/national authenticity.