Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Arab and Arab American Feminisms

Ok, I'm curious. I am trying to go this evening. I hope its a real feminist talk- not just a "Oh, we'll deal with honor killings, domestic violence and forced marriages to our first cousins after we run the Zionist entity into the sea" type talk.

Arab and Arab American Feminisms
Modern Times Bookstore 888 Valencia st., San Francisco.

A celebration of the new book “Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging,” edited by Rabab Abdulhadi ,Evelyn Alsultany, Nadine Naber.

In this collection, Arab and Arab American feminists enlist their intimate experiences to challenge simplistic and long-held assumptions about gender, sexuality, and commitments to feminism and justice-centered struggles. Contributors hail from multiple geographical sites, spiritualities, occupations, sexualities, class backgrounds, and generations. Poets, creative writers, artists, scholars, and activists employ a mix of genres to express feminist issues and highlight how Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives simultaneously inhabit multiple, overlapping, and intersecting spaces: within families and communities; in anticolonial and antiracist struggles; in debates over spirituality and the divine; within radical, feminist, and queer spaces; in academia and on the street; and between each other.

Contributors explore themes as diverse as the intersections between gender, sexuality, Orientalism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism, and the restoration of Arab Jews to Arab American histories. This book asks how members of diasporic communities navigate their sense of belonging when the country in which they live wages wars in the lands of their ancestors. Arab and Arab American Feminisms opens up new possibilities for placing grounded Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives at the center of gender studies, Middle East studies, American studies, and ethnic studies.

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